'We're not just a roomful of architects,' say IDK's members, as they discuss designing the V&A's David Bowie Centre and working with communities from London to Paris to Devon
Only a week after meeting them did it dawn on me that IDK isn’t an acronym of its members’ surnames. So what does it mean?
A Google search suggests ‘I don’t know’, confirmed in an analogue way later, over the phone: ‘50 per cent it’s an anonymous acronym – which we like,’ says director Mike Lim. ‘But it still has us wondering, when we meet people, if they’ll think to ask!’
It’s also why it says in its glossy, zine-like brochure, that IDK’s architecture ‘begins at the brief… built from conversations’, with Lim adding that ‘it reminds us we’re not supposed to have all the answers, that we should focus on the process rather than the outcome’.
In 2023, that fascination with process saw this small practice of seven win the open competition to design the David Bowie Centre (DBC) in the Diller, Scofidio + Renfro-designed V&A East Storehouse, opening in September. Sited in the existing Here East, at 16,000m2 and holding more than half a million pieces from the museum’s collections, East Storehouse is the working end of the V&A’s move to Stratford’s Queen Elizabeth Park, where O’Donnell + Tuomey’s V&A East Museum will open in 2026.
Unlike this though, the Storehouse – where many items are intended to be publicly accessible, even touchable – is being hailed as the future of curation and display. This excited IDK enough to enter the DBC competition and sprinkle their own bit of stardust on Ziggy.
I meet Lim and IDK’s two other directors at its office in the curiously Dickensian context of Iliffe Yard, in the shadow of Elephant and Castle’s burgeoning towers. It’s clear from the conversation flow and the way one tops and another tails a line of thinking, that these three have spent a while in each others’ company.
Lim and James Pockson met as Cambridge undergraduates, both meeting Roddy Bow while doing their MAs at the RCA in 2014. Between them, they’ve notched up years of hard graft in practice, with Lim exhausting himself in OMA’s Hong Kong competitions team, Pockson at Herzog & de Meuron, knee-deep in ‘the big hole’ that was Tate Modern and Bow finding his groove at Lacaton & Vassal. Living in Paris for the last decade, he now forms IDK’s satellite office.
The David Bowie Centre is their most significant project to date. Set within the Storehouse, it will hold more than 90,000 items tracing the shape-shifting icon’s rise to fame, and intends to be as trailblazing as the man himself. That’s not just down to the expected audiovisual shows and curated displays, but also a guiderail system for Bowie’s many costumes – like one you might see in your local dry cleaner, but on amphetamine.
Multi-disciplinary practice
IDK’s stance, as with cultural and community projects it has worked on before, was a multi-disciplinary one, which members put down in no small measure to spending their RCA time hanging out with artists and designers.
‘We founded IDK with the idea that we wanted to do things differently, developing a model of practice that didn’t just involve a roomful of architects,’ says Pockson, looking around, as he points out the team members that are designers or based in cultural project delivery. This might have resulted in the ‘Fun Palace’ overwhelm of the original competition entry, but the final design has since been tempered by IDK’s real-world pragmatism and keenness to listen.
Lim presents as the firm’s frontman, explaining the DBC and the impact of discussions with curators around generating their bespoke take on a standard pallet racking system to fill the space. But I sense that Pockson, who worked with Nissen Richards Studio at the Courtauld, is leading delivery.
‘Coming from OMA, I’m happiest at the conceptual scale, while Jim brings an eye for technical detail, and Roddy has real awareness of economy of means,’ says Lim. Bow nuances the generalism: ‘I’d say we’re a support ecosystem. With most of our jobs, one of us tends to run with it, as we realised the best way was to trust each other, while knowing we can rely on one another when in need of a different skill set.’
Collaborative ethos
What is clear is that the firm feeds off collaboration, not just internally but with clients and communities that engage it. Bow’s youth near Bantham Beach AONB in Devon, saw him lead on Outside, a project there that delivered a much-needed community hub for local residents and their kids.
A mini skateboard bowl sits alongside small-scale farming, pottery space and café. Designed as a simple steel shed with corrugated plastic cladding, there’s enough to get a sense of the firm’s drive for minimal material use and loose-fit flexibility.
Describing it, Bow reveals his surfer days: ‘In the surfboard shaping bay, we ran strip lights at low level so you can register the needed symmetry using shadows as a sanding guide.’ Yes, Outside might be about bigger-picture activities, but IDK is also engaging with users to enable them to work at the scale of the detail.
Likewise with Meanwhile Gardens, sitting by the Grand Union Canal, in the shadow of North Kensington’s Trellick Tower. Here, IDK has been involved with local residents since 2018, helping to create a new vision for the semi-derelict 19th-century industrial building and garden space that the 50-year-old community association shares with a local steel band.
‘We had a long consultation period with both to see how the building could be revised and retrofitted,’ says Pockson, adding that the study qualified for RBKC funding – no pro bono here. The result is a low-cost proposal of a suspended steel floor over the existing building roof, allowing for new timber-framed admin spaces as well as rooftop gardens, which has a refreshing contingency.
‘We had to build a business case to the local authority to prove this hub and its garden were critical assets for Trellick and Cheltenham estate residents, he explains. ‘We’ve worked with this community for years – one of our long-form projects where we go in deep.’ It’s now at site survey investigation stage.
With IDK, ideas gestate too. Its Recycled Warehouse project, housing a client’s Airstream caravans, had IDK considering the sustainability angle and procuring a steel portal frame off eBay ‘like farmers do’, with client cost benefits. Lim regrets the project not going forward, but, merged with that Bantham Beach ‘loose-fit’ approach, the ideas have fed into the firm’s Blencathra Business Centre in the Lake District. There, hybrid steel monopitch roofs create elegant, respectful workspaces in this protected landscape.
In an evolution of this, IDK is working on Bromyard Depot in rural Herefordshire, which also includes the possibility of housing. The firm has dallied with domestic work, and taken pride in it – Pockson shows me Clematis Cottage, a sustainable retrofit of a 19th-century farm workers’ house ‘that’s a meditation on new conservation practice’. Its new stone porch, he adds, ‘is a homage to Gimson’s village hall in Kelmscott!’ But scaling up is in IDK’s sights, and there is hope that, with the government’s huge housing targets, a tie-in with an architect delivery partner might be the perfect segue into the sector.
In the meantime, Bow is putting the final touches to a small exhibition in Paris. Primed by his reuse experience at Lacaton & Vassal, he’s worked for years with youth groups in La Courneuve, a Paris suburb undergoing major demolition and urban upheaval. ‘La cité du turfu’ (French slang for future) is the result of design workshops he runs with the teenagers to imagine new narratives for their housing blocks and urban spaces. They’ll be taking over part of the Palais de Tokyo this month, until 11 May.
IDK's blueprint for flexibility
I ask whether all this ‘engagement’ results in the kind of ‘mission creep’ that can harm young firms. But IDK’s members feel the best work comes of it. That said, they did the hard yards at previous practices and are aware of not over-committing themselves.
‘We came out of firms that spent time and energy ensuring things stayed exactly as designed,’ says Lim. ‘For us, we know when we hand over a project, it will change and adapt – we just want to create a framework to support that.’
That humility seems almost out of place for a driven firm that, Lim adds, has another ‘exciting but secret’ cultural project on the cards. But success here is born out of IDK’s ongoing grassroots work.
‘Understanding the impact architecture can have on any organisation’s viability forces us to ask ourselves how much building is actually needed – and stopping there,’ muses Pockson. ‘Our ambition is to get really good at knowing when enough is enough.’