Many qualities of a building can be improved late in a project: a better material, a more refined detail, a more careful light fitting. Proportion cannot. It is set in the first weeks of design and it determines everything that follows.

We work with a small set of proportional systems — not as rules, but as a way of checking our intuition. Rooms are tested in section before they are tested in plan; openings are drawn in relation to the wall that contains them, not only to the view.

The section first

A plan tells you how a building works. A section tells you how it feels. The relationship between the height of a room and its width, the height of a window sill relative to a seated person, the depth of a reveal relative to the thickness of the wall: these are the decisions that make a room calm or uneasy.

In every project, we build at least one room at full scale in the studio, in cardboard, before we finalise its height. It is a slow method. It is also the only one we trust.

A plan tells you how a building works. A section tells you how it feels.