I wrote a short text called ‘The Pleasure Principle’ for New Architects 5. Published every five years by  the Architecture Foundation, the book collects the UK’s best new architects.

Against the familiar account of the digital superseding the physical, I saw a current running through the book revealing an appetite for friction, heat, noise, crowds, food: a picnic becomes utopia; a sauna is an amphitheatre; weather is architecture; audience is environment.

Architecture here is not so much a monument or a shelter as it is, simply put, experience: fleeting, uncertain, alive with the presence of other people. That so much of it is commissioned by festivals and nightclubs says something about our society of spectacle, but also about what little else young practices are given to build and transform today.

I hope this unruliness, this ambition for the full sensory spectrum of architecture, can extend beyond the pavilion and the festival and into our streets, schools and housing - all those more durable spaces of everyday life.

The work shown below is by Farrokh Aman, Cake Architecture and badweather

Book designed by Studio Christopher Victor