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Podcast: Architectural storytelling with Mat Barnes of CAN

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Words:
Eleanor Young

Mat Barnes, who enjoys the richness that references and reminiscences bring to architectural design, explains his approach. Plus Piers Taylor of Invisible Studio on the way stories make sense of buildings

Where does storytelling fit into architecture? What themes and images are the right basis for references and how should architects find and design from them? In the latest RIBAJ Meets podcast, in partnership with Origin Doors and Windows, Mat Barnes of CAN architecture and ideas studio, and RIBAJ Rising Star, explains his catholic, creative and colourful take on drawing out ideas and telling stories in design.

 

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His best known project – his own home, Mountain View – offers a clue to how he works with ideas drawing on Sir John Soane, the Matterhorn and Disneyland with caves and supergraphics. And Barnes talks about how to apply that to other homes and how he brings the personal expression of clients into architecture, from initial conversations to telling people’s story using everything from decoration to structure, through the gamut of 3D printing and bright structure. And it is not just personal clients. Barnes has also told the story of London through his Mudlark chair and hanging out on the beaches of the Thames. Meanwhile, in Newcastle he created a flexible framework for city discussions with scaffold and neon yellow oriel windows.

  • Tiles, table, worksurfaces and structure all tell a tale in CAN’s Mountain View.
    Tiles, table, worksurfaces and structure all tell a tale in CAN’s Mountain View. Credit: Jim Stephenson
  • Mat Barnes of CAN’s own home with its extension: Mountain View.
    Mat Barnes of CAN’s own home with its extension: Mountain View. Credit: Jim Stephenson
  • Playful red arrows and plants stacked on the ‘ruins’ of the original back wall at Mountain View.
    Playful red arrows and plants stacked on the ‘ruins’ of the original back wall at Mountain View. Credit: Jim Stephenson
  • A glass extension in Islington: a lively structure where Mies van der Rohe meets King George.
    A glass extension in Islington: a lively structure where Mies van der Rohe meets King George. Credit: Jim Stephenson
  • Newcastle Urban Rooms with its scaffold and 3D printed furniture by CAN.
    Newcastle Urban Rooms with its scaffold and 3D printed furniture by CAN. Credit: Jim Stephenson
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Barnes talks to host Eleanor Young about how this explicit storytelling fits with the less-is-less-carbon mantra by which reducing materials reduces embodied carbon. He gives some clues of how he gets these ideas through planning. And drawing on, and reacting to, his Welsh heritage he talks about his personal take on incorporating nature.

The podcast features a guest appearance from Piers Taylor of Invisible Studio who reminds us how stories are our ways of making sense of buildings and muses on the stories of a building that emerge after the architect has finished, what gets projected onto them and how buildings embody stories.

 

Mat Barnes and Piers Taylor.
Mat Barnes and Piers Taylor.

Presented by Eleanor Young. Producers Paul Hirons and Flo Armitage-Hookes, original music by Steffen Addington
RIBAJ Meets series three is produced in partnership with Origin Doors and Windows

 

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