London Festival of Architecture
London Festival of Architecture
The London Festival of Architecture (LFA) is the world’s largest annual festival of architecture. The festival aims to support London’s architectural talent by enthusing and engaging with the public and finding new ways to look at familiar places.
The festival began in 2004 and has since grown to become the world's largest annual architecture festival. The festival attracts a vast public audience (400,000 in 2017 and over 600,000 people in 2018) and a global media audience of millions. The majority of events are free and are staged by a core festival programming team, working alongside architectural and design practices and a group of professional programme supporters including Taylor Maxwell.
The festival celebrates London as a global hub of architectural experimentation, practice and debate. Last year the festival transitioned to a more digital approach, engaging a vast new online audience. This year, the festival returns in June to offer a hybrid programme of online and physical events exploring the theme of 'care'.
2021: Care
Following on from last year’s focus on ‘power’, this year the festival aimed to explore the theme of ‘care’ and how we can better care for ourselves, each other, our cities and the environment. The festival included a hybrid of both physical and digital events such as installations, walking tours, debates, workshops, film screenings and many more.
The concept of ‘care’ means many things for different people, including architects. At a basic level, architects are responsible for designing buildings which provide services that care for people – from hospitals to schools and youth clubs.
The festival aimed to address questions such as, how has it taken a global pandemic to help us take stock of what we care most about, is now the chance for our industry to rethink methods of constructing new buildings and how are we addressing care for the built environment?
2021 Events
The programme of events for June are available to browse here. The London Festival of Architecture is unique in the breadth and creativity of its event organisers, allowing them to deliver a varied and engaging programme of events suited to a wide audience.
This year, Taylor Maxwell ran a walking tour of Bankside, exploring how architects, planners and contractors have taken care in the built environment through clever design and careful selection of materials. Starting at the former Blackfriars Station and finishing with the striking Tate Modern, the team explored how buildings are carefully designed to provide services and facilities to the community, blend new developments with the existing vernacular, reduce the impact of construction on the environment and restore or commemorate sites of historic importance.
Our London Bridge Showroom
Standing adjacent to the renowned Borough Market, The Hop Exchange is a striking building steeped in history, just a stone’s throw from the London Bridge mainline and underground stations. Our materials showroom, located in The Hop Exchange’s west wing, has been created to display a wide range of facade and timber materials to inspire creativity in architectural design.
With over 350 different brick types on display, the showroom offers a unique facility to view examples from all the major manufacturers in the UK and Europe. Alongside the brick offering, other products on display include natural stone, composite decking, cast stone, engineered wood flooring, brick cladding, terracotta cladding, metal and mesh aluminium systems, stone cladding and precast concrete solutions. The showroom offers an unrivalled opportunity for architects and their clients to meet with our experienced team and create and develop your project design ideas.
More about us
Taylor Maxwell have been providing facade solutions to the construction industry for over 60 years. Our experienced teams based across the UK, provide professional consultation on external building materials at all stages of the design process, supporting projects from design concept through to completion.
We work in close partnership with clients, architects and contractors to source and deliver the optimum choice of brick, timber, cladding, masonry and offsite solutions that will meet their project requirements in terms of aesthetics, technical performance and budget.
To achieve the best solution and to ensure the most cost-effective approach, we recommend contacting us at an early stage of your project, so that we can provide the maximum input and guidance.