All Building is Rebuilding

Lecture by visiting professor William Mann

Witherford Watson Mann Architects

8/10/2026 - 18h30

LOCI Tournai
Rue du Glategnies, 6
7500 Tournai
Belgium

Witherford Watson Mann Architects respond to what Bruno Latour summarised as ‚the necessity of redoing everything once again in a strange combination of conservation and innovation.‘ Our work explores how, as architects, we can place the durability of buildings at the service of social and cultural change; how resilient construction can enable both alteration and continuity; how both buildings and the city can be constructed by accumulation and transformation over time. In this perspective, we see ourselves as intermediaries between complex inheritances and possible futures, in a condition in which all building is rebuilding.

What to hold onto, to build a renewed identity around? Elements of the oldest age, largest scale, most distinctive daylight or decor, and most robust bearing capacity: the qualities that are hardest to create today are precisely those that we should hold onto.

What to destroy? as little as possible, as cleanly as possible. This is about leveraging strategic benefit through focused intervention.

Most buildings of any age have undergone several generations of change. We can revive the ghosts of past iterations, not forensically, but sketchily, approximately - through paraphrase and rhyming with contemporary means.

We find space for the present within the temporal jigsaw we have inherited. The patterns of growth and change offer clues to possible futures.

To do all these, we need a deep knowledge of why the existing is as it is, and what its capacities are - understanding the human forces that shaped these containers, and are set in stone, even though they were time-specific and place-bound. The labour to acquire this knowledge is a form of respect, not just for the building, but for the conditions that shaped a particular reality.

The elusive goal is to maintain the integrity of what we have inherited, while teasing it into a new organic unity.

William will talk about the work of the practice through projects including Astley Castle and the social housing for older people in Bermondsey, winners of the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2013 and 2025.

https://wwmarchitects.co.uk/studio

William Mann

William Mann studied architecture at the University of Cambridge and Harvard, graduating in 1991. After working on archaeological sites in Rome and Egypt, he gained professional experience in London and Flanders, including at Tim Ronalds Architects. At Robbrecht en Daem Architecten, Ghent, he was joint project architect for the new concert hall and opera house in Bruges. Since establishing Witherford Watson Mann Architects, he has worked as project director on a range of public projects including the Whitechapel Gallery, Upper Lea Valley Landscape Strategy, Gistel social housing and Walthamstow Wetlands. William has written on London’s edge landscapes, social engineering, self-build, buildings’ nicknames, and the hybrid urbanism of Flanders for Archis, Oase and other magazines, as well as contributing chapters to several books on the relation between urban regeneration and social change. He was visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen in 2014.