Publications

David Redhead profiles Muf, a collaborative practice of art and architecture committed to public realm projects, exploring its manifesto, projects and modes of collaborative working.

Introduction

It didn't take long for architects Juliet Bidgood and Liza Fior with artist Katherine Clarke to get their design partnership noticed when they set up in practice in 1994. For reasons that, eight years later, Liza Fior is a bit reluctant to discuss, the trio called themselves Muf.

With its naughty/feminist overtones the provocative sounding name proved an attention-winner, garnering the practice a public profile – and apparently an instinctive degree of antipathy in British architecture's conservative male heartland – long before they had any real work to speak of.

As This is what we do, the practice's manifesto published in 2001, puts it: "We colluded with journalists' projection of us as three women set apart from the architectural mainstream. We refused to talk about our gender and allowed misinterpretations of what 'muf' might mean."

Manifesto

You can understand why, after all this time, Fior is reluctant to go back over the ground again. Muf's agenda was always broader and deeper than the jokey sounding name implied.

Fior prefers to stress that Muf's desire was to challenge the "frustrating limitations of architecture" by forging a cross-disciplinary practice that drew on art and architecture in equal measure and to work in the public realm, a sector which, as she admits, did not really exist at the time "except if you could prove you were bringing tourists in".

Projects

As the range of its work proves, Muf is silencing the sceptics and is beginning to get noticed for the unconventional scope of its work rather than its 'attitude'.

Projects range from the design of the newly installed Gainsborough exhibition at Tate Britain to a comprehensive urban renewal scheme for the London Borough of Newham, and from the creation of a structure designed to house the only Roman mosaics left in situ on the site of Verulanium to a Halloween artwork constructed from 200 pumpkins.

Since 1997, Muf has picked up more than fifteen commissions for public art, many relating to or spinning off from the urban design agenda which is at the heart of its preoccupations.

In 1998 for example, Katherine Clarke created Urban Grazing for Hackney Council, an image-based work that transformed an East End of London housing estate – albeit temporarily – into an urban idyll by means of photo-montage.

Alongside its own art Muf continues to gather a considerable number of design commissions for art and architecture shows – presumably because of its connection and familiarity with the medium – such as the Denys Lasdun retrospective and the design of the current Gainsborough exhibition at Tate Britain.

Personnel

Juliet Bidgood left in 1996 but it is clear that the strong and close relationship between Liza Fior and Katherine Clarke – the two remaining founder members – has been key to the success of the practice.

The pair met at the Architectural Association, a school at the heart of British avant-garde design, where both Fior, an architect and Clarke, a former arts student from Goldsmiths College were tutors: "We have a strong ongoing dialogue," says Fior, "a dialogue that sometimes descends into stand-up rows."

South Bank Project

If Fior and Clarke sometimes differ on details, they long ago agreed on the fundamentals. It is characteristic that Muf's first project together was a submission for the competition to design the South Bank (won by Richard Rogers) which consisted not of a grand built solution but of a written polemic about the site.

Muf takes the view that the research process that every architectural project involves is not necessarily just the preparation for a building, it is often an end in itself: "We constructed a method, a process in advance of having the front to design a building and sometimes discovered that this had become the end in itself..."

Muf's book explains."We'd arrive at competitive interviews with our 'how to' diagram and wait among the other shortlisted people sitting with cardboard boxes on their knees holding the usual... beautifully finished architectural models."

It is all very well, to argue that it is the "edges, the limits of a brief and limitations under which it comes into being that provide the content for each urban strategy," but if not a building, what does Muf's approach generate?

The first real chance to assess what their theories meant in practice came when Muf was commissioned by the local council to come up with suggestions for improvements to the Southwark Street environment on London's South Bank in the lead-up to the opening of Tate Modern in the late 1990s.

Muf's first impulse was an exhaustive process of research during which they talked to people in the street, in their houses, in shops, offices and cafés, each time calling on the next person someone mentioned. This research turned into Katherine Clarke's film 100 desires for Southwark Street.

Captured on film, people's responses then formed the basis street improvements from 'wallpapering' a bus stop under a railway bridge to the planting of a honeysuckle at the entrance to a housing estate. The film also emphasised Muf's belief in the power of the image "as the only tangible idea in advance of construction".

As the anonymous author of This is what we do puts it: "Making images that acknowledge the imaginary, the unexpected, and the unofficial is an attempt to value the kind of knowledge that is often marginalised or ignored; it is to say to the people who are the larger client body, your most weird thoughts are socially relevant."

Most significant, since the completion of the Southwark project in 1998, the public realm – the practice's primary target area from the start – has responded to Muf's open-ended approach to issues of urban renewal with increasing enthusiasm. A steady stream of London's deprived inner-city boroughs – Islington, Hackney, Tower Hamlets, Barking and Dagenham – have asked Muf to apply its research and design skills to different regenerative challenges.

"We get work via conventional referrals such as through RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) and we keep a keen eye on Regeneration magazine," says Liza Fior. The latest client The London Borough of Newham has commissioned a Design Framework for the borough, a comprehensive survey of problems and opportunities – "what's happened and what's happening" Liza Fior calls it – which sets out to take regeneration forward by establishing new partnerships between local businesses, schools, residents and the client itself.

Collaborative Working

Muf's 'collective identity' also differed significantly from the formal pyramids – boss at the top making strategic and design decisions, junior designers at the bottom laying out the toilets – favoured by most architectural practices.

From the start, Muf worked in the same room so that 'dialogues and eavesdropping would inform projects' and was committed to the notion of collaboration, both between different disciplines and between the experienced and less so. This is what we do describes it as the "deliberate creation of a sufficiently generous atmosphere to make room for different disciplines and personalities, both ours and those of consultants, friends and lovers...the haphazard search for an alternative to fighting over the same pencil."

Criticism

Inevitably, its unconventional approach to the pitch, its refusal to play the 'building as trophy' and its feminist stance have sometimes made Muf something of an Aunt Sally for less enlightened members of the architectural establishment.

The practice's (in hindsight fortunate) dismissal from a commission to work on part of the Millennium Dome was greeted by a letter to Blueprint magazine which celebrated Muf's 'firing' with glee and dismissed the practice's previous work as mere hype: "park benches and photographs."

And the absence of a proper building from the Muf portfolio, has always represented a useful stick with which to beat the practice: "The real test' will only come when Muf is able to realise a significant building," wrote the Architects Journal in 1999.

Liza Fior, whose outspokenness is legendary, reacts with surprising equanimity to the charge, pointing out that Muf now has two buildings "on the boards".

In any case, eight years on, the practice can justifiably argue that the unusual mix of skills that it offers and the lateral thinking that defines its approach has allowed Muf to forge its own distinct niche and to pick up commissions in three related areas – public art, exhibition design and urban planning and design – which few other practices would think of bracketing together.

Alive & Kicking

Liza Fior acknowledges that, as the practice has expanded, Muf has grown a tad more "pragmatic and realistic" but while the practice may have mellowed as it has aged, its core values remain refreshingly constant.

Yes, Muf has got bigger but as the current staff blend shows – five architects, three artists and an opera singer-cum-administrator – and the diagram of the office layouts in This is What We Do show, both the architecture-meets-art blend and the collaborative approach that represent the Muf ideal are still very much alive and kicking.

The writer

David Redhead is an author, curator, copywriter and consultant in design, business and the visual arts. His commercial clients include Habitat, Ford motor company and Nokia.

Links

www.muf.co.uk

David Redhead

David Redhead is an author, curator, copywriter and consultant in design, business and the visual arts. His commercial clients include Habitat, Ford motor company and Nokia.

First published: a-n.co.uk April 2003