Barricade and Beacon is a display about protest architecture. It features two installations: Barricade, made from U-Build box units, and Beacon, a bamboo protest tower based on designs by Extinction Rebellion. The display is on at the V&A from 14 September 2024 – 28 February 2025 and is presented by the V&A/RIBA partnership for the 2024 London Design Festival in collaboration with Studio Bark, an award-winning architecture practice that creates buildings that are radical, sensitive and zero carbon.
Design and Protest, 2024, directed by Dillon Parsons and filmed by Dillon Parsons and Kiki Powers, explores how designers and architects are using their skills to create impermanent, low-impact structures and features interviews with beacon designer, Julian Maynard-Smith and activist, Frankie Henderson.
Here, the curator of Barricade and Beacon, Sandy Jones, talks to one of Studio Bark’s founding members, Nick Newman, about sustainability in design and how architects are using their skills to design for protest.
In what ways are you challenging traditional approaches to architecture?
Our sister company, Studio Bark Projects and a not-for-profit build system U-Build allow us to do things differently: to trial new materials and methods of construction, run community workshops, collaborate with universities and gain a really good understanding of our buildings.
Opportunities to research new materials and low carbon methods of construction have come about through our work on paragraph 84 on the National Planning Policy Framework. This clause enables the development of rural housing in areas that would otherwise be rejected by the local authority, provided the designs are of exceptional quality. Meeting these high standards requires extensive research, the fruits of which can spill over into the rest of our work.
You are aiming for all your new builds to be Whole Life Zero Carbon by 2025 – are you on track and what strategies have helped?
The field of Whole Life Zero Carbon (WLZC) was still very much in its infancy when we set ourselves the target, with no agreed national standard. Up to this point, our work has therefore been to refine our own position and methodologies for what it should and should not include. As an example, some definitions of WLZC allow for off-site offsetting through a third party scheme, a risky strategy, since many voluntary offsetting schemes have been proven ineffective. Instead, we have focused on the reduction of carbon in the building fabric, whilst balancing anything remaining within the limits of the project site, a solution well suited to our work with rural housing and associated land management requirements. In commercial retrofits with our U-Build system, we are finding that the greatest savings are coming from the ability for our structures to be fully reused, rather than going to landfill.
To assist us in better analysing embodied carbon, we have successfully applied for funding from Innovate UK to develop an embodied carbon accounting tool for small practices, which has been used to create preliminary analysis of our projects. If the onsite carbon and reusability mentioned above is accounted for, then it is looking promising for our targets.
In the intervening period, the wider industry has also since gathered pace. A pilot version of the UK Net Zero Carbon standard has just been launched, which has defined what it means to claim WLZC. This is a positive step, however, it means that we will now need to reassess our own studies. In summary I think it’s fair to say that we are on track, but there is still a degree of uncertainty over where the track will meet its final destination.
How did you become interested in the intersection between activism and architecture?
When we started Studio Bark, awareness about the climate crisis was far less widespread. Around 2018 – 19, it felt as though something changed. An IPCC report in 2018 stated that there was only 12 years to avert climate catastrophe. We saw a surge in activism: Greta Thunberg, the school strikes, and Extinction Rebellion (XR)’s occupation of Central London in 2019. The latter pressured the UK parliament to declare a Climate Emergency in May 2019, with the RIBA declaring a Climate Emergency in June. It was impressive to see the direct and measurable impact this group had had on our profession in only a few months, after years of discussion had made only incremental improvements in policy.
As a studio we became interested in XR’s tactics of direct action, using disruption to create awareness. We gifted the designs of our U-Build box designs which found their function in XR’s October 2019 protests. XR aimed to close off all routes into parliament, but was short on infrastructure following a raid on one of their main warehouses. However, in the meantime, 600 boxes had been crowdsourced and assembled by architects and designers, using hypothetical designs created by students at the University of East London.
The boxes were built into towers, barricades and stages, and became some of the main structures enabling the continued occupation of Trafalgar Square. This first-hand experience of what came to be known as Protest Architecture, provided the inspiration for my book, Protest Architecture: Structures of Civil Resistance (RIBA Publishing, 2024) which explores the intersection between architecture and activism in historical moments of societal change.
How are architects and designers making a difference through their engagement with pressing topical issues such as the climate and ecological emergency?
Architects are generally quite a caring profession, known for their work on issues such as social housing. However systemic issues such as the climate crisis are – by definition – much harder to tackle within the confines of a single practice. An architect may choose to specify a greener material or a more efficient building form, but if the society that they practise within does not demand or incentivise this behaviour, then their suggestions may be discarded as uneconomic or impractical by their clients.
However, where it may be harder to make individual changes, an observed rise of grass-roots networks have enabled practitioners to help lobby for change on an industry level. For the first time, architectural workers can now join a trade union in UVWSAW (United Voices of The World Section of Architectural Workers) or lobby their professional bodies by joining the Future Architects Front. The Architects Climate Action Network has successfully campaigned to change government policy. Black Females in Architecture champions diversity and provides a platform for its members to connect with wider industry.
In the research for the book, it was inspiring to also come across hundreds of examples across the world and throughout history showing how built structures have been influential on the outcome of protest movements.
These include the intricate treehouse and tunnel networks used to protect ancient forests, in places as remote as Styx Valley, Tasmania and Fairy Creek, Canada.
The creation of protest structures include a 60m steel tower built to block the expansion of Narita airport in Japan. The efforts of these protesters delayed the expansion of the airport for years and inspired a later tower in the ZAD (Zone to Defend/Zone à Défendre) which successfully stopped construction of the proposed Grand Ouest Airport, near Nantes, France. Of course, barricades have been used throughout history, not just in the emblematic Parisian barricades of the French Revolution, but also prominent in some of the most recent protests, such as the UCLA protests California, 2024. Here and in other universities around the world, students protesting Israel’s occupation of Palestine created a series of barricades and other structures to help them maintain an extended presence on the campus.
In many ways the Barricade and Beacon display is a coalescence of these ideas and practices. How did you approach the design and what are the key messages?
As a study and representation of protest architecture, we felt that this wasn’t a piece of work that could be completed in isolation. We worked with groups and individuals who had been involved in designing and implementing protest structures, including from XR and Project Bunny Rabbit. The design for the structures grew from those dialogues and was refined with the V&A team.
The original brief for a barricade was expanded to include two twin balancing bamboo beacons. This style of protest structure has only been built once, and never in the UK, so it was a challenge to recreate it. Even at the chosen 2/3rds scale there was only 200mm tolerance to the museum’s coffered ceiling.
Some of the display’s key messages were captured in a specially produced film by DIllon Parsons. It interviews beacon designer Julian Maynard Smith and activist Frankie Henderson, who explain how the modular barricades and beacons have empowered protesters, frustrated police removal teams and created a sense of awe and wonder to those who encountered them.
There is also a more sombre message; after watching the film, visitors are guided to a life size interactive ‘lock-on’ tube, which allows them to experience connecting hands through the structure with another visitor. As a result of the Police Crime Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 and the Public Order Act 2023, this is something which is now illegal in a protest context and could lead to a six-month imprisonment, an unlimited fine or both. By raising awareness of this issue it is hoped that our society may come to reconsider the rationale of imprisoning some of those working hardest to protect it. If we are to meet the huge challenges we currently face as a society, we need to free all of our creative minds.
Barricade and Beacon is presented by the V&A/RIBA Partnership in room 127 (next to the V&A’s Architecture Gallery entrance) until 28 February 2025.
