AJ 40 under 40: Maich Swift Architects

The tower-like timber and canvas structure of Maich Swift’s Potemkin Theatre, last year’s winner of the Architecture Foundation’s Antepavilion competition, significantly raised the profile of this practice, which prides itself on ‘a thorough understanding of materials and methods of building’.

For the founding directors, Paul Maich, 37, and Ted Swift, 33, this approach was honed at Caruso St John, where they both worked for five years, notably on the 2016 RIBA Stirling Prize-winning Newport Street Gallery, before setting up their own practice.

The evocative and clever Antepavilion design, with its references both to Jacques Tati films and revolutionary Russian Constructivist structures, utilised simple materials and construction methods in a sophisticated way. This can be seen also in their Chiltern Street project, where relatively unfinished materials of clay, Douglas fir panels and patterned cork floor were put together with care and rigour to create a boutique shop interior.

Source:David Grandorge

The built Potemkin Theatre, winner of the 2019 Architecture Foundation Antepavilion competition

It’s an approach they are now applying to a wide range of ongoing projects, which include a cross-laminated timber summer house in the Gower Peninsula in South Wales, the remodelling of a stone longhouse in the Brecon Beacons using new slipform walls and a lime slurry finish, and a feasibility study on the adaptation of a group of buildings in north-east Perthshire to provide space for artists’ residencies.

Castle in the Air: Antepavilion 3 by Maich Swift Architects

Chiltern Street by Maich Swift Architects

AJ 40 under 40 in association with