Inspiration

It's always been our annual tradition in the studio to have our Christmas party just after Christmas, which is, let's face it, when we need a bit of cheering up. So it's really the New Year dinner and here we are again in the beautiful meeting room of the Art Worker's Guild, earlier this week....  and this is what I said to everyone that evening!

Hello all, and can I just say – Bridie, Charlie and I are really happy to be here! It was definitely looking, earlier in the week, like there might be no flights back down from Orkney at all, that and I might be making a screen appearance on a teams call, a bit like a dystopian vision of the future (or a horrible reminder of Covid) – and Charlie just messaged me this afternoon to say that Kirkwall airport is once again shut, no flights in and out at all. So I think we picked our moment well.

Because getting together for our annual dinner at the Guild, which feels like it’s settling into a lovely tradition now, reminds me of something. There is no substitute on earth for sitting and eating and drinking, and celebrating a good year together, in person. Why is that? It’s because we’re all people – we are social beings. We’re not computers, we’re not AI bots, we’re not units. We’re all people, and I think this dinner, so beautifully cooked by Dave and his team, and so beautifully put together by Stevie, is what reminds us that the studio is not just a business, it’s not a spreadsheet or an algorithm, it’s not just numbers. We are a collective of skilled, like-minded people of all ages and many talents who have a shared purpose in creating wonderful buildings, interiors, furniture, towns.

Unfortunately because we are architects and designers a lot of it is about numbers or avoiding the terrible things that could happen if our buildings fall down, or if slightly less terrible things happen if someone’s sofa is late for delivery, and I guess, from time to time, it can feel to all of us as if the numbers or the legals or getting things right or avoiding the wrong things can become overwhelming and what keeps you up at night. In fact, this is a real problem of the age we live and work in – which I suppose has become one of incredible aversion to risk, and equally, simultaneously, of ever-increasing bureaucratic complexity.

I think an awful lot of us feel this every single day at work. It can sometimes be hard to remember that we are all, collectively, designers, working together to make the world a more beautiful and I hope a more meaningful place. So it’s good to be in this wonderful candlelit room reminding ourselves that not a single one of the talented and renowned architects and artists, stained glass designers, letter cutters, sculptors, book designers, basket weavers, printers, photographers, embroiderers or writers (you name it, every single one of these crafts and skills is represented here) whose portraits now line the walls of this room made an impact on the world because they were good at spreadsheets or because they avoided making mistakes.

No – they all have a common thread – they knew how to think, how to see, how to look, how to learn, how to connect their hand and their eye through their minds, and they knew how to create things or buildings or places of beauty and meaning.

It feels harder and harder to do this in the world, and in particular in a world which every time you open the paper appears to get madder and madder, a place in which we can all feel as if we are existing in a form of permacrisis or never ending chaos, depending on how you look at it Particularly for some of the younger people in the studio, I really feel that your entire working lives have been set against this backdrop of absolutely everything lurching from one crisis to the next. Partly, I don’t mind saying, the media wants us all to think this, to keep us glued to our screens and our doom scrolling (with plenty of ads to click on along the way).

But that’s why it becomes all the more important, as we celebrate this new year, and a wonderful year of hard work and beautiful projects behind us, to remember the really important, permanent thing in life – what is it that gives us purpose?

And above all else, I think we do have purpose… and we should be proud of what we’re doing together. You are all making the most wonderful contribution to this, and so thank you, from the bottom of my heart, and Happy New Year!