What Does it Take to Make a Building?
Piers Taylor in conversation with Sarah Wigglesworth
A film by Jim Stephenson, 2021 - Music and Sound Design by Simon James
’What Does It Take to Make a Building’ is the second in a series of intimate portraits filmed by Jim Stephenson with Piers Taylor in conversation with an architect, where they reflect on their practice, ideas, influences, education and future, through the lens of one of their seminal buildings.
This new film focusses on Sarah Wigglesworth who talks to Taylor about studying architecture at Cambridge in a context where women architects were rarely mentioned, and the development of her socially and environmentally minded practice which has been mainly lived out in the groundbreaking house and studio ’Stock Orchard Street’ she designed and built with her partner Jeremy Till. Stock Orchard Street demonstrates the application of numerous experimental and prototypical ideas, and Wigglesworth discusses how designing and building the project more than 20 years ago with Till, and living and working in it since has helped shape a belief that architecture can be a powerful force for change where political ideals can be set out in material ways.
“I want to make everyday worlds better, it’s the worlds we inhabit all the time... I think there’s a chance that we’re going down a route whereby only if you can afford it do you deserve it and I don’t think that’s a great model for a civic society” Sarah Wigglesworth