Interview with Leo Hollis: The Architectural History of London and St. Paul's Cathedral

Listen to the Podcast Episode:

Mitchell: Thanks for joining us. Today we have the privilege of speaking with Leo Hollis, he's an urbanist, a historian, and an author. He's written several books including “Phoenix”,  “Inheritance”, and “Cities Are Good for You.” We'll be speaking with Leo about the history of London’s St Paul's Cathedral and the future of what cities look like. We hope you enjoy the conversation.

Mitchell: Alright Leo, thank you so much for joining us today, looking forward to a really insightful and good conversation with you. Can we start off and tell us a little bit about your background, the books you've authored, and your current interests.

Leo: Thank you. I would say it's an odd title, but I would say that I'm not an architect nor am I even possibly a sort of architectural historian. I'm an urbanist, which is to say that I spend most of my time thinking about cities and obviously the question of architecture and the built environment is absolutely hardwired into that kind of sort of question. So how did I get to that? Because it's not necessarily something which is a sort of straightforward job if you like. I think I became fascinated by cities very early on partly because as a 10-year-old, my parents decided to move out of London into the countryside and I think I spent my teenage years desperately pining to return to the city. I never felt at home in the rural surroundings, so getting back to the city, in some way sort of idolizing what the city was, was in some ways the start of that journey. I come from quite a sort of bookish family although there are designers, my mother was a landscape designer, my brother is an architect, but I've always sort of lived my life around books, but the thing that really got me thinking about the sort of city is actually walking. One of the things that I do almost as a kind of sort of sort practice is walking around sort of the city. In particular this started off with London and just finding my way around the city and learning how it works. That, combined with you know sort of going to the archives and going to the library really is where I think sort of urbanism comes together. It's a lived experience as well as a sort of intellectual practice and the strange thing about being in London and particularly, if one is always crossing the city, at one point I was working in the West End living in the East end, I would walk across the city every morning to go to work and it would be about a 45 minute walk or so and I would always walk past St Paul's Cathedral and St Paul's Cathedral is the one building you can almost sort of see from any other point in the city so it became this kind of compass and this idea of London and there came a moment just when I felt, you know, what's the story behind this place and how does it connect with the rest of the city around it. So my first book was thinking about a very important moment in London's history which is The Great Fire of London mid-17th century and I would argue that through a series of calamities in some ways sort of, you know, a revolution, a fire, a plague, another Revolution, London was transformed and became the first modern city and I needed to unpack that in some way and going back to St Paul's Cathedral was always in some way the Touchstone in which to tell that story. So, in some ways architecture came into the flow, it wasn't there from the outset, it was always part of the mix of trying to tell the story of a city and I've always been sort of fascinated in architecture. My second book dug into that even more so it was a history of London through 12 buildings called the stones of London, so going right from the origins to the present day and choosing iconic buildings of a particular moment as a way to tell the story of that sequence of history, that chapter of urban sort of life, and buildings are quite good because they're often quite silent, although they are incredibly loud and big and in front of you but they are very good at telling you stories. They are very good to be used as the kind of the sort of the sandpit of Storytelling as well because a building is not just a building obviously and I'm sure that's something that we're going to go unpack later on. How we talk about stories tells such an important story about who we are so, I in some ways, have been and continue to have unfinished business with London and the history of London but I've also had this kind of other strain which is thinking about what a city is and how it works and whether it is working, if you like. Another book of mine was a book called “Cities Are Good For You” which came out around that moment when people were talking about the future of cities. It was that particular moment when in some ways the world suddenly became Urban but we got to that moment in 2007 when the world became 50% Urban for the very first time in our history and so a lot of people were wondering “Is this a good thing, is this a bad thing, what can we do?”  When we were thinking about some climate change is the city a good or a bad place in order to mitigate or to sort of face up to the challenges of the next sort of century and that's been something that I've continued to do. In my current work I'm sort of looking at sort of city building in the 21st century so there is a historic element, there is a kind of, you know, a present element trying to get to the idea of what cities, buildings, architecture, what this thing we do is and how we live in them and how the relationship between flesh and stone, between you know sort of space and Community, as well as, you know, what are we going to do in order to make sure that we survive the rest of this century.

Mitchell: And where do your current interests lie?

Leo: My current interests, I will always toggle between the past and the sort of future but I'm very much thinking about the current experiments in city building that I'm observing around the world. There are lots of new ideas about what a city is, which are emerging I think in unexpected places, often in the middle of a desert, you know. There's also a number of ideas that are coming about as a result of increasing network sort of relationships, so you know, how something like a kind of some Network City could be developed and the relationship between technology and this sort of city-ness with society and how that's in some ways offering a new kind of sort of social contract. So there's lots to be challenged by, to think through. We probably are living at the moment in a moment of city building, which is pretty unprecedented. There are more cities being built now from scratch than it has been for a very long time.

Mitchell: That's super interesting. Going back to your to your point on the history of London and how you kind of think about the city of London, it seems like you think about these cities in general in almost a narrative form and the buildings themselves play characters in the story and I find that super fascinating and that's kind of how I read your book, the Phoenix, and that's kind of my impression, is that the buildings are the lens through which you view and are the characters through which you view or understand a story. To me that's a much more interesting, complex, rich, and in-depth way to see and understand a city. A deeper way to understand and see a city as opposed to just viewing buildings as these isolated moments and the history and the dates and these isolated instances. I just think the perspective is incredibly interesting and I find that fascinating also because that's I feel like in some ways the way when we design buildings, or when our group designed buildings, we kind of look at the narrative of somebody's life and what are the events that are going to happen in somebody's life, what are the spaces that they use on a daily basis, and that's how we kind of look at how a home, let's say, would be designed, through a narrative of their life, so I find that fascinating.

Leo: I mean it is and it's a challenge because it goes against quite a lot of what we think probably as designers but also kind of as historians or sort of theorists. Architectural history is very much kind of based around the idea that an architect will draw a building, the building is then built, and then that's the end of the story, the first day that the building opens, that is the last chapter and that's completely, completely, wrong. I think a building is a really good way of trying to get people to see into people's minds in terms of their intentions and their aspirations. Quite often you look at a building as a kind of sort of machine and you take it apart and it's got bits which explain what the architect is doing but I think there's a bigger story. There was something that I was trying to sort of think through as I was walking around this morning, which is how many lives does a building have and I think it probably starts off its first and second and perhaps even its third life starts even before it exists so it's a time, it's a place, and because we often, sort of as you were saying, we often see a building as isolated and we say it's the architect, it's the building, and there happens to be some stuff around it but that's not how one actually experiences a building, that's not how one lives around a city either, so context is absolutely everything. Architectural historians are very bad at thinking about the spaces and the lives between buildings and that's actually where society is, that's where the social is, that's what's so sort of fascinating is it's in those places which the architectural historian often overlooks is where the most interesting things are happening.

Mitchell: So, a large amount of your work is about London and obviously you're a citizen of London, you lived there your entire life yes? Or then you moved out to the country?

Leo: More or less, yes.

Mitchell: Can you give us a brief overview of St Paul's and its place within London's history?

Leo: Yeah of course. I mean London's history sort of goes back to obviously the arrival of the Romans. There wasn't really anything before the Romans sort of came to London. They built a temple on top of one of the two hills on the Northern Shores of The Thames. A number of years later, in the 7th Century. A small chapel was built here and then this slowly grew out to be in some ways the Parish Church of the city. So London's quite complicated and I'm not too sure how much we want to sort of necessarily unpack that, in that there is the city of London, which is the city within the city walls and that's a Capital “C” City and then there is London which is everything outside it. So, St. Paul’s has always been the Parish Church of the city of London. It's only later in the 18th and 19th century that it became in some ways the cathedral for the whole of London and then in some ways it's like the whole of England so it's a principal Church within the capital. As the capital grew so did the power of the cathedral and there were always improvements done until the Reformation, really, where it went from being obviously a Catholic Cathedral a Gothic Catholic Cathedral with a big Spire to a Protestant Church and it was left to decline. So, it in some way sort of it was on its uppers; the spire had collapsed, there had been fires, it was really almost not being used as a church anymore. It was a kind of a sort of meeting place in the middle of the city but where occasionally there were sort of religious services. Actually, all of the important religious ceremonies happened outside the cathedral and so this is where the very famous English poet John Donne would in some ways do all his sermons outside in the grounds of the cathedral but not within the Nave itself. There was an attempt in the 17th century to revive it and the first British architect, Inigo Jones, had started work on improving and I suppose, cleaning up the cathedral. But then suddenly in the 1640’s, there was the beginning of the English Civil War and this was a political war, it was a religious war, it was a war between various different parts of the country as well and so London was right at the heart of this tumult. Throughout the Civil War, which went on more or less for around 20 years, St. Paul’s was left to completely decay. So, when you get the return of the monarchy in 1660, he sees the decay of the cathedral as a kind of personal front. This was his church and he wanted to improve it and just as he was starting to think about how to improve it there was The Great Fire of London in 16th of September 1666 and this basically wiped out the whole of the central part of the city of London including the cathedral. So in some ways people had to sort of start again, and my story in the Phoenix is how you get philosophy, politics, economics, the origins of the Empire, theology, it all comes to play in the reconstruction of St. Paul's Cathedral and in particular, its architect, who was a man called Sir Christopher Wren who in some ways seemed to be responsible for the rebuilding of London after The Great Fire. I slightly unpack that and say he's not as responsible as many people think but he's undoubtedly responsible for St. Paul’s Cathedral and his attempt of recreating and rethinking what a cathedral should be at that particular moment in history and in that particular moment of modernity, I think is a really interesting way of reflecting and thinking about urbanism, about politics, about philosophy, about engineering, about science. So, you see this building which looks like a piece of heritage now. It’s a historical monument, but actually was so much more active in its time when he was being built that you can draw these different stories out of it.

Mitchell: Can you tell us a little bit more about Christopher Wren and his affiliation with the cathedral, his role in the rebuilding of St Paul's?

Leo:  Yeah absolutely. I mean, Wren is a fascinating character he's in some ways part of the first generations of what one could call British architecture. If you think that in the previous generation there had been one very significant architect, Inigo Jones who I mentioned earlier. Inigo Jones had gone to Italy, he had traveled around Vicenza and seen the work of Palladio, who was one of the great architects of that region. He came back and he sort of said “Okay, I'm going to be the very first architect and I'm going to build modern architecture” and he started with four or five buildings around London and this transformed what architecture was; it gave a profession to what was beforehand an amateur pursuit, it gave a sense of geometry, that there was a discipline, that there was a in some way a code, there was a way of building, which was brand new. Wren inherited this from Inigo Jones but he also brought something else to it because, before he was an architect, Wren was in fact the most important kind of scientist of his generation. He had spent quite a lot of time during the Civil War in Oxford, in some ways being part of a community of new thinkers who call themselves “The Natural Philosophers.” What they were doing was they were adopting the ideas of Francis Bacon as well as new ideas coming from Europe, whether that was Galileo or Descartes and they were formulating what basically could be called modern science, a sort of empiricism. He was one of the founding members of the Royal Society. As a mathematician, as a puzzle solver, as an astronomer, Wren had this brilliantly scientific mind, and he combined it with this pursuit of architecture. He decided that he would take that mathematics, and he would turn it into solid stone. He also came from a leading Anglican family so they were quite powerful in the church, so he also had this religious thread running through him and you can see that in the way that he recreates and thinks through some of the problems of St. Paul's Cathedral. I see the cathedral itself as a solution to a number of different problems and the genius of Wren was he was able to combine all those different elements into one magnificent whole but if you look at each of those individual problems then you could admire him even more because each one was so complicated and brings out a different part of his personality, whether that's to do with design, whether that was to do with engineering and holding that building up. I mean the stories about how he was able to do the mathematics to hold that building up are just wonderful and also dealing with problems. It cost a lot of money and there wasn't a lot of money about. The one reason why the cathedral has a particular design on the front, so on the West front, is not because of Wren's design but because he had to react to a problem in the Quarry. As a result, he's always changing his designs, he's always accommodating different parts, so unlike most architectural history where you look at the final designs on the paper, on the renders, and then the building looks exactly like it, Wren's final cathedral looks nothing like his original plans for it. He’s always solving problems, and it took 40 years, so even within the time that it took for the building to grow, you had two kings, a revolution, no you had four Kings and a revolution. So, time changed, and he still was able to create a building that was flexible enough to reflect back to the city what it needed. He did die and on his deathbed he said, “I should never have wasted my time with such,” you know, he should have always sort of stuck with mathematics and never have spent his time in architecture. But I think what I admire about him is not his can I say it his “Howard Rock-ness” he is the opposite of Howard Rock in the Fountain Head because Rock refuses for his building to ever change. Wren was totally, totally, the opposite of that.

Mitchell: That's super interesting it's like, he's adaptable, he's understanding, and that's maybe the genius behind him. He's confronted with all these problems and still finds solutions to kind of bring together the best possible solution available as opposed to this kind of ardent inflexibility like you may see. I think a fair amount of architects today take on that position.

Leo: I think it reflects on him as a person and his adaptability. I think there's also what he was trying to do as he was starting to develop his first plans for St. Paul’s, and I think this is credit to him and to his friends who were those early members of the Royal Society. You think that they were solely focused in scientific matters but they were also trying to try to think through what English culture was or British architecture was. Beforehand, everything had been sort of handmade by craftsmen and some of it was impressive and some of it was very beautiful but after the Civil War and as London was becoming this first modern city, what does that city-ness look like? How do you create a legible modernity through design? That can be with the street, it can be materials, so using brick and stone rather than wood and thatch. But it's also thinking about “How do you take stuff like Dutch architecture or German architecture or Italian and French and make it English?” and I think in some ways the genius of English architecture is it takes all of those elements and combines it and tries to make something that is utterly brand new out of it. So you can sort of see that it's got all those things, you can sort of see it's got a bit of something from Paris, and a bit of something from Rome, and it's got perhaps a Dutch spire to it, and it also goes back and looks at the ancient classical texts as well but it makes it thoroughly modern and it makes it thoroughly national I think and that is also something that is deeply, sometimes you don't see that, but it’s really interesting for good or bad I mean. Perhaps this is a heritage that we are stuck with and we need to get rid of but at that time you can see they're sort of saying “What does modernity look like?”

Mitchell: I think that's a great segue into my next question, would be to tell us a little bit about London's transition out of the medieval and into the modern. We’ve kind of talked about that but what does that look like in terms of the city design and the setup of the social, economical, and political stage?

Leo: I think there were things that were occurring as it were, during that period anyway, this was the 17th century, so it was an era of extraordinary transition. The first half of the century had seen the most horrific wars throughout Europe and that in some way is what finally arrived in England during the Civil War. You see a transformation in science and intellectual thinking and philosophy. You also see the beginnings of empire and also all the horrors that come with that. The places like London, Antwerp, and Paris were becoming rich on the goods that they had taken from far-flung new colonies and that was going to have a very dramatic effect in not only transforming those cities but creating these global networks. But what happened specifically in London during the Civil War, I would say that the first thing that happens with something as traumatic as that is there's a rupture with the past and then modernity is quite interesting in the way that it seeks its identity in the future; it projects itself into the future, it can no longer, in the same way that the medieval society, go back and rest on authority and the past. So, when they were thinking about rebuilding London out of the ashes of the fire, they had to project the city into the future rather than just rebuilding the past and the way that did this I think was both in design but also in terms of kind of law and practice. So the city became a  human body, if you like, it became a network through which money and bodies and goods had to flow and the flow of these goods was going to become essential to what makes a city run, and that was something that was completely new so that had an implication on not just making sure that the carts and horses were able to move up and down the street in an easy fashion or that people were actually able to walk up and down and go about their business, but it also started to feed into ideas of banking and how do you get money from one place to another and that's quite easy across a city but at this moment you're also thinking how do you get money across oceans, across channels. So, you start seeing banking occurring exactly at the same time as all of these new innovations in architecture and they are one and the same. Things like the lease hold, and the mortgage, and the way that you build a house. These were all transforming as a result of this particular moment, and you wouldn't have suburbia without these changes in manufacturing and in construction. So, London started to grow as a result of all of this innovation and it started to grow with a very particular profit driven mechanism. The beautiful London streets that we see, the archetypal Georgian Terraces, they very much were a design, an architecture, a kind of formula, almost an architectural formula, that was developed during this period in the aftermath of The Great Fire. So, you can sort of see this modernity sort of coming about not just in the way things looked but in the way the people acted as well. There was, you see, a sort of rise in things like luxury goods. This was incredibly important if you're buying one of these new suburban houses and you're buying it with no decorations in it and you are a new Bourgeois who hasn't inherited large amounts of furniture, you need to buy new furniture, you need to buy new goods, which sort of show people your wealth and one of the key things, I think, at this time, and this might sound a bit of a digression, but I think it's weirdly sort of central is exactly as we're talking at this moment. So, you have Christopher Wren who's a wonderful architect, is also a scientist, one of the key items for a wealthy person to do at this time was a clock. The clocks that were developed in London during the 1660’s and the 1670’s were extraordinary because they were the first really accurate pendulum clocks and keeping time became incredibly important. By the end of the century, you actually get the very first factories that time people going to work, and coming, and what their work hours are. So, you start seeing people looking at time in a completely different way and that is absolutely essential to modernity.

Mitchell: That's fascinating Leo, thank you. What values do you feel will be expressed in cities of the future and what would those look like?

Leo: I think that's a wonderful and very deep question. I think what I found when I was researching cities, a good few, which was probably about 10 years ago now that I sort of started that. You know, I was trying to find some of the key elements of what a sort of city is and I think the thing that I came out with more than anything else and, you know, I think there are really important things to say about the challenges that we face in terms of urbanism, in terms of sort of globalization, in terms of climate change, but the thing that people don't talk about and don't think about in terms of design often is trust, which is a very difficult thing to get one's head around because often one thinks trust is purely a kind of binary relationship between two people who are transacting and obviously that's incredibly important in a city. So, somebody like Richard Sennett would say “Cities were created so that two strangers could meet” and they meet as it were “on the level,” which is actually a way of talking about the city of London, that used to be called “on the level” which meant that you met as equals and that you could trust each other, you could do the deal. That’s what a city was, it was where strangers transacted and then went on with their lives. Also, it's where people rub up against each other and it is where people are neighbors and not friends and so trust is incredibly important in that aspect. So, trust, it strikes me, works through cities in a lot of different ways but the thing that struck me as I was doing my research is the thing that undermines trust more than anything else is inequality because you start to see barriers between things and places so, thinking about building a city around trust, one has to start thinking about public space and public space is also one of the most endangered spaces within the city, not only because we're seeing increasingly the privatization of public space, it's also that public space is becoming often degraded. A public space is a place basically where people meet and they treat each other as equals, so one has to ask questions when one is designing public space: Who is this for? How do you make it inclusive? How do you draw people into this space? Because the only way that we're ever going to learn to be citizens is by coming face to face with things that one doesn't see on a daily basis. You only can see the other faces of the city in a public space because you're not going to do it in your day-to-day and you're not going to go out of your way to be confronted by something. It’s about creating these spaces where you meet the unexpected and it's important in these places, you don't have to agree, you trust each other, but you don't have to agree with each other. Often, we're trying to look for some places, space, tribes of conciliation or of unity but a city is also a place where people are allowed to disagree, have different values, but again, you only get to know how to live around those places by experiencing and really living in public spaces. There was a very interesting that was done about politeness and it was done in an East End market so a very working class area of London where it's known to be one of the most multicultural kind of communities and in the marketplace, so the place where you go and get your vegetables on a day-to-day basis was found to be one of the most polite places in England. It wasn't the village with all the Bourgeois, it wasn't in the highest enclaves, it was in this working class where people had to come together, buy food and they learn how to get on with it. It doesn't have to be a ground public space, but it needs to be these spaces that we really come to because we come and sort of find out about the city and we find out about ourselves, because citizenship is not something that is just given, it's something that we have to nurture. Going back to that initial idea of trust, that strikes me as the value which you can sort of hang other values, and other practices, and other ideas of insight. Another one is thinking about the design of children's play areas which I find is so important and is given so little consideration that it's often seen as the gift of some developer at the end of a project rather than the thing right at the heart of the development. It’s so interesting to think about. There was a brilliant mayor in Bogota in the 1990’s called Enrique Penalosa, he said “What if we designed a city around children? What would that be like?” And you suddenly see that having cars parked along the street becomes a problem because they're getting in the way of community, some kind of safety. You start to think about “Okay let's get the cars off the street. Should we put them in a car park, or should we just provide enough public transport so people don't need to have cars?”

Mitchell: Having a three-year-old myself I can relate to that idea of how important the design of those social spaces for the children are, and how nuanced the interactions are, how important they are for the growth of a child too. In some sense, in a design of a space for children you're setting up, not only the psychological health of the social interactions of these kids at that moment, but also for the future too. So, I mean that makes complete sense.

Leo: Yeah, and I think I was very, very, attracted by this Latin American idea actually sort of comes out of Curitiba in Brazil, which is urban acupuncture, which is the age of the master plan has disappeared but if you did tiny little changes and you actually think quite seriously who they are for they can have massive impacts. That could be a pocket park it could be, for example, cable cars that they use quite a lot, or it could be anything but it’s suddenly thinking about those small gestures of generosity. We are binding people together. In some ways it's going back to, and just to make sure, these are not my ideas at all, they're going back to Jay Jacobs, who I think is still the person to go back to on this. It’s thinking about that ballet of Hudson Street, the subtle interweaving of everyday lives, not living in each other's pockets, not dependent upon strong ties of friendship or family but just neighborliness.

Mitchell: As you're saying this, I'm envisioning all of the physical manifestations in a city on how these public spaces would look, what the form of them is. Are they green spaces? Are they not? But you had made an interesting comment when we spoke before, maybe they're actually not physical in the future. Do you have any strong thoughts on that?

Leo: Yes, I mean I'm always tempted to suggest to architects that the answer to many of their problems is “don't build.” The inclination of designers and architects is to do stuff when sometimes not doing stuff is the right decision. There are always opportunities to adapt. Obviously, that's very incredibly important but also, I’m trying to think of a good example of when not to do things but obviously we know the dangers of knocking buildings down and sort of just putting new ones up. You know sometimes retrofit is so much better than new build and that is a kind of way of not building. Although it still does take a lot of effort and thinking through but it's also thinking about how people, let's say, move through the city and thinking about that in different ways. Not designing them into funnels where they instantly are going to be crowded and be hassled but it's sometimes thinking about the serendipitous within the urban.

Mitchell: I think it's maybe questioning too about the architect's maybe conventional identity as a form giver and somebody who's going to create the space for the people as opposed to do the other way around. Can we look at it in another light where the people are giving us the information about how they'd like to use a space, a building, and then maybe we're going in and making small interventions. Let’s call it light modifications to accommodate that natural more intuitive use, I think that's a much more sensitive approach and maybe I'm talking directly to myself here.

Leo: But I think it's on a day-to-day level, an architect is hired by a client to make their dreams come true. You can't get away from that kind of relationship. I think it’s thinking obviously through that and thinking, yes again, beyond the envelope of the building itself and slowly working through. In some way we're in search of the intangible through the tangible.

Mitchell: I'm curious, this is making me think of a book, The Edifice Complex. Are you familiar?

Leo:  Yes, very much so.

Mitchell: Yeah, questions about architecture and power, and the association of the architect with that person in power. And, yes, it's our livelihood, depends upon catering and servicing those people that have access to money to fund the buildings and that's the nature of our profession. But is there a way to rethink that or is there a way to, I don't know, that's a question that is coming to my mind as I'm currently reading that book.

Leo: Yes, I mean I think it's extremely difficult to make a living and keep an office running if you're not going to be building for somebody. There are the odd people who are lucky enough to go off and theorize without building. But no, I think the majority of design practices are focused in on creating something out of space, out of volumes, and light and shade, and all of that. But I do think that, yes, an architect should always question its relationship to power. I think there's some really good work that’s being done on that. It’s true about sort of saying The Edifice Complex, which is about dictators doing extraordinary things, Ozymandias, or like Augustus. But it's also true of things like infrastructure that building a highway in one place and not another is just as much a kind of act of power. So, I think an architect should be thinking about power and particularly when it's thinking about who the space is for. One has an extraordinary amount of power in controlling space because one understands it and thinks spatially. You’re much more sensitive to these questions than most other people. Thinking about “Who is this for?”  and the power relationships within that space is a rich pursuit.

Mitchell: I think in the past, in history let's call it, the conception of a building was also often the impulse or desire of a small group of people, maybe even one person, right? So, you're getting these kind of buildings that come to fruition as a result of a single person but, as time has progressed, it seems to me, and I could be wrong, and with technology, that the conception of buildings is becoming democratized. People are having more say in how a building looks, what the space functions for, how parks are situated. That’s what it feels like at least, I'd like to believe that, but I think that's a product of technology too and us being able to communicate together. Which makes me feel optimistic about the future.

Leo: Yes, I mean I’d split that down the middle slightly, because I think, I don't know what the the percentage is, but there is a huge, large number of the city which basically built with architects. It comes from essentially an operating system of some variety, whether that's a developer or almost like non-architecture in some ways. So, the percentage that actually has an architect involved in order to create something that is unique is tiny compared to the whole. If you think of something that somebody like Keller Easterling, I think is really good at writing, who is at Yale, she very much talks about the operating system of urban space. I don't know what the percentage is but you know a large number is in some way sort of non-architected space. So, when you get the opportunity to design something and really think about that space, and that light, and that relationship to materials, it’s a privilege obviously. It’s a wonderful opportunity to do something. I think the majority of clients, I imagine, are still family clients but they're also obviously corporations and there is the state itself that is a client. I'm sure everyone would want to be building football stadiums, but most people probably don't spend their time doing something slightly more domestic and humble. I think it's still a sort of case of, and you can tell me better than I can sort of tell you, is how you articulate that relationship between the client and the architect and when you are talking through space, how you teach each other the language, that then is finally articulated in the building itself.

Mitchell: Right, yeah, I think it would depend upon who the client is and the building typology as well. I mean, there’s an array of different building types and then depending upon who you're talking to, you have to understand their motives as well, right? What are they after? And I often say, I'm almost a therapist first and then I'm an architect and so in in a lot of ways that feels like maybe the right approach to really understand who the client is, what their aspirations are, what they're after, and then maybe attempting to guide them slightly within, let’s call it, bowling lanes to not only the most economical solution, the most sustainable solution, or maybe the most socially responsible solution as well. I think that may be an outlook or an approach to it that I would call a healthy approach but it's never going to be perfect and there's always an array of… With a building, it's such a static thing, so in most cases you're building something that's in essence frozen in time. It's never going to check all the boxes and satisfy everybody but maybe you can plan inside of a building, in its lifespan, to cater to multiple different groups of people, to evolve, that's a very challenging thing to do. I mean that's a lot of variables to try to address though.

Leo: No absolutely, thinking going back to that thought I was having this morning about how many ages, or how many lives, does the building have and so it has: before it's built, it has you know sort of time, space, and then the design, and then it has the build, and then it's lived in, and then it's retrofitted in some way. I live in an early 20th century suburban house in London and what's true, pretty much every suburban house in London is, the wall between the kitchen and the sitting room, what we do today, has been knocked through because people no longer divide those two spaces up in their day-to-day and so that changes for the house, that's a whole new life, and then what happens after that. But the last life will obviously be when it's a ruin. But it’s trying to think “Is there 8 lives, is there 10 lives? How many times? After an architect has handed over the keys, that building has only just been born and in some way, it’s barely learned language yet.

Mitchell: I think the next life of a lot of our homes are going to be where we're sitting in chairs with our VR masks on in the metaverse experiencing a city digitally!

Leo: I don't think we will, I mean I think I see a tech-lash; I think people are desperate for experiences again.

Mitchell: I completely agree with you, I think that's in an idealistic view, and I think culturally too, I've seen a little bit of, let's call it, a compass change towards a more kind of humanistic, health oriented, physical oriented, interactive mindset change. At least I’d like to think so.

Leo: I think it’s going to take us a long time to work out actually the true impact of the pandemic and the lockdown but I do note that alongside that degradation of public space over a long time, so over the privatization of public space, I do think that the pandemic really did knock us back in terms of being able to be around other people. I think we need to come up with reasons to go back to those places and I think we do actually yearn to be back in large groups in the public spaces in the city.  We just find it very difficult to find our way back there.

Mitchell: It’ll be a journey back there. But that's amazing, Leo, thank you for that insight. I thought that was a really insightful conversation. Do you want to add anything, or do you have any items you want to add?

Leo: No, I think, read Jay Jacobs, I mean.

Mitchell: Well great, I think we can wrap it up there, Leo. Thank you so much again, I mean that was very insightful. Your book, like I mentioned at the beginning, “Phoenix” was very formative for me personally and I’m sure many others. Do you want to give the listeners a place where they can contact you at or name your books?

Leo: Yeah, I'm on Twitter, I've got a website which is leohollis.co.uk and that also has contact details as well but Twitter, Instagram as well. I'm all over the social media.

Mitchell: Okay I'd love to see some of your walks through London, that'd be great.

Leo: When you're here we'll go for a short 4-Hour walk.

Mitchell: Okay! Yeah, I better start building my cardio right now. Well, thank you so much, Leo, appreciate it.