Welcome to Future Talks by RTF, a series of conversations with the visionaries who turn ideas into spaces and experiences that shape our world. Today, we’re joined by Keith R. Williams, a chartered architect, urban designer, and the founder of Keith Williams Architects. Known for his work on public and cultural buildings—such as theatres, museums, galleries, libraries, and universities—Keith’s portfolio brings architectural storytelling to life. Since founding his practice in 2001, he has received over 40 national and international awards, solidifying his role in architecture and urban design. The first monograph on the firm’s work entitled “Keith Williams : Architecture of the Specific” was first published by Images Publishing Ltd, Melbourne in 2010.
Keith’s journey started with studies at Kingston School of Art and Greenwich University, followed by early work with Terry Farrell and co-founding Pawson Williams Architects. His own practice, Keith Williams Architects, is recognized for sustainable design that respects community and environment. Beyond his practice, Keith teaches, serves as an external examiner, and judges architectural competitions globally. His insights are captured in Keith Williams: Architecture of the Specific, his firm’s first monograph, published by Images Publishing in 2010.
RTF: Hi Keith, We are glad to have you as a guest on Future Talks by RTF. Thanks for joining us. How does the evolution of the architectural world today contrast with when you started at Keith Williams Architects?
Keith: I think that the biggest difference is really concerns speed and access to information. Through the Internet it is possible to research practically any published project anywhere in the world, in an instant. Access to technological solutions, data, manufacturer’s materials, products and their specification, can be retrieved within a minute or two. Prior to the Internet, research was intriguing but slow, leafing through magazines, books and publications, and trawling through the office technical library or commissioning specialist librarians with detailed technological knowledge to do it for you. It is all also far easier to follow the zeitgeist, tapping into new architectural themes, technologies, innovations and trends as they emerge from anywhere around the world. That is incredibly exciting.
RTF: Highlight the exciting part and the challenges you faced in your tenure as a chair at Design South East, Civic Trust National Awards Panel and Lewisham Design Review Panel.
Keith: The roles are very different. Design review at Lewisham and Design South East concerns peer critique at pre-planning permission or pre-building permit stages, where I am trying to influence the design trajectory and design outcome of an individual project before it is permitted. The challenge is to try to make the developing designs just that bit better and to optimise their potential, with each project’s site and context considered to be the ultimate client, and hence the text of the appropriateness or otherwise of the proposals.
Turning to awards, I have been fortunate to receive a great many awards for my projects, but also to see things from the other side in my various roles as jury chair.
In 2023 I stood down from my role as chair of the Civic Trust Awards after more than a decade of service, but I have also chaired many other awards panels and continue to do so. In contrast to Design Review, awards panels make judgment after the event as the design outcome has already been established by the completed project. So the role switches to sifting the field of submitted projects, and along with a distinguished panel of judges, searching for the best and most significant buildings completed in any given year, or sometimes longer. Whilst every project is assessed and many become the subject of vigorous debate, my role is to synthesise and add focus to the discussion. As chair, I encourage my panel to leave their personal preferences and architectural tastes outside the room and evaluate each building on its merits, which has proven quite a useful strategy leading to a surprising consensus across the Panel for the very best projects.
The excitement, or perhaps satisfaction may be a more appropriate term, in these roles, comes from being able to synthesise and influence in some small way both what is built and what is eventually garlanded through the awards systems.
RTF: Can you share a project that has had a lasting impact on your architectural journey and holds great significance to you?
Keith : Probably hundreds as I draw inspiration from so many sources, but two projects stand out.
The first is a seminal private house, the Villa Savoye in Poissy near Paris (1928-1931) by Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret. It was my first encounter with an architecture that celebrated movement through form and expression, wrapping a whole programme of living around processing through a building, the “promenade architecturale”, whilst also celebrating architecture’s relationship with surface and light.
The second is the German pavilion for the Barcelona Exposition of 1929 by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. In contrast with Villa Savoye, this seemingly aprogrammatic building which only existed for a few months before being dismantled, was a seminal essay in the deployment of architectural plane both opaque or transparent, and the positioning of the column to enclose space and set up vista and route with the most minimal means, all crafted in the most exquisitely executed materiality.
It was rebuilt in replica form in 1986 with a high degree of accuracy so it is possible to experience Mies’ brilliantly orchestrated architectural moves with considerable fidelity to the original.
RTF: Do you consider design philosophy to be time-relative? How does your architectural practice reflect your design philosophy?
Keith: Design philosophy cannot be static and must evolve to remain relevant to changing circumstances. Perhaps we are less concerned with the primacy of form and architectural expression, or “style wars” than when I began my career. We are rightly much more aware of sustainability and low carbon design which are fundamental to how are going to be able to build now and in the future.
AI has recently come to forefront of topical debate, but to me it is another tool to aid the creative process. When I started my studies, we drew on drawing boards and learnt hand crafted techniques. We transitioned to computers and software which long ago replaced the drawing board in most studios. I am pleased that many architecture schools are again emphasising the teaching of hand drawing and model making skills, still the most direct way of articulating the creative thought process from brain to a representational form. AI opens new ways of doing things but is not yet at least a replacement, for the miracle of human thought.
I once wrote that “In architecture there is a part that is logical, pragmatic, reasoned and there is a part that emerges from the sensual and the aesthetic. Without a collision between these apparently opposing principles it seems unlikely that great architecture can ever be made”
The fundamental building blocks of architecture, light, scale, proportion, movement and materiality remain core tenets of my design philosophy which I think is evident in our work.
RTF: How important is it for the designers to shrug off the rigidity in their approach towards design to be on the ever-evolving design bandwagon?
Keith: The making of architecture is a slow and highly complex process, with many of my projects taking 5 or even 10 years to design and construct. The process is not nimble and cannot readily dance to this or that new hot tune. Nor should it try to. Whilst it is important not to be static and our work evolves, I come back to the fundamental principles of architecture, light, scale, proportion, movement and materiality, which have underpinned great architecture for at least two thousand years and have held good through almost every architectural movement or style or transition to new technology. Get the fundamentals right and the rest should fall into place.
RTF: What is your perspective on the evolving role of architectural criticism and the influence of architectural critics in the digital age?
Keith: Objective architectural critique should hold a mirror up to architecture and the society that it serves. Done well it encourages us to see things in different perhaps new ways. The finest critics will also position their analysis and their polemic with an historical context or continuum.
I was lucky to be a student in an era when great critics were significant in number but more importantly in intellect. Vincent Scully, Ada Louise Huxtable, Bob Maxwell, Kenneth Frampton, Colin Rowe, Charles Jencks most using their roles as university deans or professors to underpin their theses, laid out their stall and their work in a polemical, finely crafted fashion.
The instant gratification of the image saturated digital age and the reduction in the range of printed media has squeezed the available space for pause, reflection and critique. The role of the critic has changed and probably diminished somewhat but that does not obviate the need for an intellectual underpinning, check and balance to what we architects do. Distinguished critics such as Paul Goldberger, Eddie Heathcote, Jonathan Glancey, Cathy Slessor, Hugh Pearman, Oliver Wainwright, and Ellis Woodman among many contribute with great insight, but critique has in part been displaced by the transient. At its most extreme, this reduces architecture which requires years of intense work to produce it, to an Instagramable moment in time or a pithy headline as the primary judgements, when architecture with its sense of permanence and longevity, is surely far more complex than just a test of the photographer’s skills.
Critics do still have an important role to play.
RTF: How do you approach communicating your architectural projects and ideas to a wider audience? Are there specific communication strategies you find most effective?
Keith: We work with leading architectural publications, mainstream newspapers and magazines and their websites for the bulk of our public communication. The printed media has a physicality to it which I like which gives a slightly greater sense of permanence, but in terms of reach, contact and instant communication the internet is brilliant.
All our projects go up on our website http://www.keithwilliamsarchitects.com/
I am happy that both printed and digital forms can coexist.
I spend little time on social media as I am far too busy, but I do use LinkedIn from time to time and we do put selected imagery up on Instagram.
RTF: What kind of attention do you give to the ‘community’ in conceptualising a project? How do pragmatism and subjectivity go hand-in-hand in it?
Keith: Community engagement is a vital part of any project, but it is extremely difficult to do successfully. We try to be as broad as we can in obtaining views from those who are likely to be affected by our projects, or have a some form of stake in them. For our Clare County Library project in southern Ireland, which will open in June 2024, at design stage we undertook a 2 day roadshow across the county of Clare engaging with the public explaining our concepts and taking feedback as to the wishes of the library users. It was extremely informative and did help us plan the library with a high degree of flexibility allowing it to be able to adapt over time to changing needs, as they may emerge in the future.
I do not think that there is a blueprint for how community engagement should be done, as each set of circumstances will be different. But it is important to reach out to the public as widely as possible since in so many instances those affected by development are left as somewhat unwilling bystanders to the whole design and planning process, which must be wrong.
RTF: How do you keep yourself motivated? What would you suggest to the budding architects who await success in the field? What must be the mindset?
Keith: If you can secure the right commissions for the right clients keeping motivated is easy. Every day presents a fresh opportunity and a fresh challenge for me as I try to create the best architecture that I can for our clients and for wider society.
I am not sure that I can offer too much advice, but I find that keeping a calm head and staying fit enables me to navigate the frustrations and setbacks that occur with any project, whilst keeping my eyes on the ultimate prize of realising my vision. Seeing each project rise from the ground, take shape and the finished building become a reality is always exciting. The realised project is the ultimate test of one’s ideas, whether those ideas and concepts unfold in the way that I envisaged, whether the light falling on the building surfaces and penetrating its interior works in the way that I imagined. And there is always a discovery, a spatial relationship somewhere, a contribution to the townscape or rare oblique view that we in the studio had not thought of, that gives surprise and hopefully delight.
RTF: Where do you find global architecture a decade from now?
Keith: Predictions are difficult as they so often are proven wrong by events, so I am wary of trying to be too definitive. My caveat stated, I do think that we will have done a lot more in the development of greener lower carbon materials. Concrete and steel production should by then have modernised at least in part and become much leaner in terms of energy and carbon emission.
AI is a new tool and make help us find new solutions to old problems or new solutions to new problems. It may contribute to the aesthetics of architecture enabling new formal languages to be discovered. All that is exciting.
I am also interested to see whether an aesthetic direction and intellectual underpinning of a new architectural movement that captures the current zeitgeist of sustainability and decarbonisation in a new and radical way will emerge. Whilst a lot may change, we will still need things like walls, floors, columns, windows, staircases and roofs so quite a lot will remain rather familiar.
Plus ça change plus, c’est la même chose.
Thank you so much for doing this interview with us. It has been a pleasure getting to know about you and your work. We’re sure that your insights will be highly valuable to our audience which includes architects and design students. We look forward to publishing this interview on our website soon.
