Four projects connected to this year’s London Festival of Architecture feature in the Architects’ Journal’s summer pavilions and installations round-up, and we couldn’t be prouder.
The AJ’s annual round-up looks back at the temporary structures that architects and designers built for festivals and public spaces over the summer. This year, a stone ruin in Shoreditch, a coffee-ring bench in Aldgate, a mesh fence in Holborn and a greenhouse on the Barbican Estate all made the list.
They are very different projects. But each one takes a small corner of the city, often somewhere people pass through without stopping, and gives them a reason to pause. Many also make a quiet case for reuse: surplus stone, borrowed paving and industrial materials put to new work.
Colour Field by Objects of Common Interest
Image credit: Jack Hall
At Principal Place in Shoreditch, Athens- and New York-based studio Objects of Common Interest turned the plaza into a temporary architectural ruin. Commissioned by BGRE and co-curated with Alter-Projects, Colour Field was a composition of geometric stone blocks set at different angles across the space, some low to the ground and others rising to around two metres.
The stone is the story. SolidNature supplied unfinished marble, quartzite and travertine drawn from surplus stock, offcuts and projects that never went ahead. Brought together, those remnants read like a collage of fragments from buildings that were never built.
Seating and pampas grass planting turned the ruin into somewhere to sit, and the stone was left to shift in tone with the weather and light from June through September. Co-founder Eleni Petaloti described it as part landscape, part ruin and part meeting place, which is a fair summary of what it offered one of the busiest corners of east London.
Macchiato: the Petticoat Lane pocket park by OUT Architecture
Image credit: Aldgate Connect
In Aldgate, OUT Architecture turned an overlooked corner of Petticoat Lane into a pocket park built around a simple, everyday ritual: meeting for coffee. The project won Aldgate Connect BID’s A Place to Belong competition and opened on New Goulston Street, outside The Colombian Coffee Company, for the Festival in June.
Its name comes from the Italian for “stain” or “trace”, and the centrepiece is exactly that: a large shared bench shaped like the ring a coffee cup leaves behind. The stainless steel nods to the machines used to make coffee, while cork seating picks up the warm tones and natural origins of the beans themselves. Seating was produced by Red Collective and Jamps Studio, with planting by Susanna Grant of LINDA and Will Scholey of Scholey Garden Design.
A circle is one of the oldest ways of gathering people together, and on one of London’s busiest market streets it gave passers-by somewhere to sit face to face. Through June the park hosted workshops and live Colombian folk music, and it stayed open to all, around the clock.
No. 1616 Fence by Webb Yates Engineers and Rana Begum
Image credit: Andy Stagg
Outside Space House, just off Kingsway, artist Rana Begum and engineers Webb Yates raised a 13-metre sculpture from an unlikely material: industrial, powder-coated fence mesh. Fencing is usually there to keep people out. Here it did the opposite, stopping passers-by in their tracks while letting them see straight through it.
The work explored boundaries, borders and belonging, and took its cue from the plain, efficient structures of pylons and radio masts. Its bold red changed as you moved around it. From some angles the layers of mesh stacked into a dense block of colour; from others they thinned to a single line or almost vanished against the building and the sky.
The piece stood on Portland stone borrowed from Albion Stone, and was fabricated by BLOQS Create with host Space House. It builds on No. 1387 Fence, the pair’s 2024 installation in Switzerland, and is the latest chapter in a long collaboration between Begum and engineer Steve Webb.
The Veggery by Studio Folk Architects and Raskl
Image credit: Gemma Sandell
To mark the close of LFA2026, Culture Mile BID installed The Veggery on St Giles Terrace on the Barbican Estate. Studio Folk Architects and design-and-build studio Raskl won the £50,000 commission through the open Seeds in the City competition, with a design that is part allotment shed, part English garden folly.
The pavilion is hexagonal in plan, with a vaulted polytunnel roof that echoes the Barbican’s own arched rooflines, topped with a one-metre turnip. Water butts stand in for columns, and a timber frame means it can be put up and taken down quickly. Its windows carry a stained-glass-style pattern developed from giant paper collages made with students from the neighbouring City of London School for Girls.
Inside, three bays of shelving held plants and potting benches, with open space for talks and events. Planting was grown with the school, local residents and groups including the Barbican Horticultural Society, and a communal meal made from the vegetables grown there was planned to close the summer. It was greenhouse, classroom, event space and lunch spot at once, and it has also served as a prototype for a possible permanent community hub.
Small spaces, big ideas about belonging
This year’s Festival theme was Belonging, and these four projects answered it in the most direct way: by making places where people want to stop. A plaza in Shoreditch, a street corner in Aldgate, a forecourt off Kingsway and a terrace in the Barbican each became, for a few months, somewhere to sit, talk, look or grow something.
They also show how much can be done with what already exists. Offcut stone, borrowed paving, off-the-shelf fence mesh and a timber frame built to come apart again all point to temporary architecture that treads lightly and leaves something behind in the memory rather than the skip.
Our congratulations go to all the designers, commissioners and partners who brought these spaces to life: Objects of Common Interest, BGRE, Alter-Projects and SolidNature; OUT Architecture and Aldgate Connect BID; Webb Yates Engineers, Rana Begum, Space House and Albion Stone; and Studio Folk Architects, Raskl and Culture Mile BID. Thank you to Frances Williams at the Architects’ Journal for the round-up.
