Event schedule

Winter Lecture

Unconfessed Architectures delivered by Huda Tayob, Senior Research Tutor at the Royal College of the Arts

Venue: Showcase, Smithfield, 1 Lindsey St, London EC1A 9HP

Unconfessed Architectures asks for a close listening to the sounds and signs of ghostly footsteps as a means to confront the coloniality of the architectural archive. Drawing on the South African architectural archive, and a series of 17th Century slave-owning manor houses, this talk looks at the condition of the archival encounters in spatial, material and affective terms. Listening to these footsteps and hauntings surfaces the imbrication of coloniality and violence, as present and enduring within the materiality of these homes and gardens. The ghostly figure disrupts the linearity of history, revealing slippages and holes, stories of revolt, mutiny, and precarious yet peripheral care. Being attendant to these archival and architectural hauntings asks us to question historical narrations - how do we meet this forgetfulness, these silences and absences? And how might listening to ghostly footsteps enable us to contend with the impossibility of certain pasts and futures?

W Partner registration.

Huda Tayob is a South African architect and architectural historian and theorist. She is currently a a senior tutor at the Royal College of Arts, London and has previously taught at the University of Cape Town, the University of Johannesburg and the Bartlett School of Architecture. Her research focuses on minor, migrant and subaltern architectures, centred on the African continent and global south. She is co-curator of the open access curriculum racespacearchitecture.org , and a lead curator of the digital exhibition, essay and podcast platform, Archive of Forgetfulness. She participated in the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale (2023) with a project titled Index of Edges, which traces watery archives, methods and stories along east African coastal edges from Cape Town to Port Said.

Welcome to the W Programme

Our community of W Partners have told us over the years how much they value simple networking events as an opportunity to connect with old contacts, and to make new ones. So we kicked off the 2025 programme with a few hours of informal conversation over a few refreshments.

Venue: Gensler, Thomas More Square, Thomas More St, London E1W 1YW 

Spring Lecture

In the first of our series of lectures in 2025, we welcomed Natalie Kane, Curator of Digital Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Lecture: Ways of Being / Ways of Building: Disability-First Perspectives

How do we live together and how do disabled people, in the words of the Crip Technoscience manifesto, thrive? How do we go beyond compliance and look to how disabled communities have invented and reinvented the contemporary built environment. The history of architecture, urbanism and disabled communities are threaded through with systemic injustice that has been fought against, from curb cuts to traffic-stopping protests, but what other conversations have arisen since these earlier days of revolt that look to the many ways we approach space? By presenting some of the thinking of the upcoming V&A exhibition Design and Disability, curator Natalie Kane will look at disability-first responses to architecture and urban design.

Venue: Shoreditch Arts Club, 6 Redchurch St, London E2 7DD. Our thanks to Buckley Gray Yeoman for hosting.

More about Natalie:

Natalie is Curator of Digital Design at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. At the V&A, Natalie is responsible for the care, research, display and collection of digital design in the Museum. With the V&A, they curated the official U.K. pavilion at the 2018 London Design Biennale, and the official U.K. Pavilion at the 2019 XXII Milan Triennale, showing the work of Forensic Architecture.

As well as a writer, Natalie is half of curatorial research project Haunted Machines which looks at the use of magical narrative in technology. Previously, Natalie was Curator at digital culture festival and lab FutureEverything in Manchester, co-curator of Impakt Festival 2017 in the Netherlands, and worked at digital arts and culture organisation Lighthouse in Brighton.

Spring Speed Mentoring

W Partners put forward mentors and mentees who get together for an evening of learning and career development. Our speed mentoring sessions are open to 2 mentees and 1 mentor from each practice. Each mentor had 4 x 15-minute mentoring sessions. Each mentee had 2 x 15-minute mentoring sessions. This gave everyone the opportunity to talk to multiple people. 

Summer Networking Event

Guest speaker

We were delighted to have Rachel Elliott, Associate Director at Lynch Architects join us as our guest speaker. She is the winner of the 2025 W Awards MJ Long Prize and you can read more about Rachel's win here.

Rachel spoke about Lynch Architects’ winning project  - Westminster Coroners Court. Starting with a brief introduction to the work of the practice, Rachel described the background to the project and her role in it, elaborating on the presentation she gave to the W Awards judges. Given only 7 minutes for that process, Rachel structured the talk by splitting the project into 7 elements, providing a framework to convey lots of information in a short space of time. Westminster Coroner’s Court is a relatively small building but there is lots to tell. In this expanded talk, Rachel elaborated on the processes, materials and collaborative practices involved in realising the project and conclude by sharing some observations about her experience in practice. This lead into an informal Q&A session.

Online Speed Mentoring

An online edition of our renowned speed mentoring series, making it more accessible to those who are not able to attend in-person events.

Autumn Lecture

Venue: Showcase,  1 Lindsay Street, Barbican, EC1A 9HP

In the second of our series of lectures in 2025, we welcomed architect-engineer-writer Smith Mordak.

Smith is an architect-engineer-writer working across disciplines to realise a regenerative economy and built environment. They are former Chief Executive of UK Green Building Council and have two decades of experience in leadership roles at built environment practices including Buro Happold, Webb Yates Engineers / Interrobang, and Studio Weave.

Follow Smith on Instagram and LinkedIn.

Winter Speed Mentoring

Venue: Foster + Partners, 39 Parkgate Rd, London SW11 4NP

W Partners were invited to put forward mentors and mentees who got together for an evening of learning and career development.  On average, each mentor had 4 x 15-minute mentoring sessions. Each mentee had 2 x 15-minute mentoring sessions. This gave everyone the opportunity to talk to multiple people.