Education
At Project Orange we are interested in practical theory. We do not have a single dominant mode of practice, rather we see our projects as narratives or stories. By collecting them together we make a body of work. We see the results as part of our ongoing conversation on the relationship between what we do and why we do it.
At Project Orange we strongly believe in the importance of education and research within the workplace as a way of critically understanding your own practices. Over the years we have an ongoing project called PO Box. This is a publication to which members of the studio contribute reflective pieces on their own work and engagement with Project Orange. For us this represents a modest but determined attempt to triangulate between theory and practice, between the world of ideas and the world of building. It has been a finalist in the RIBA’s President’s Medals for practice located research. The most recent is titled ‘Help!’ and speaks to the climate emergency.
We also have two office trips a year – sometimes to see a specific piece of architecture, and at others to have a great experience. We have been to Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, Brighton, Amsterdam, Sheffield, Suffolk, Canterbury, London and Berlin.
“Is it OK to feel anxiety: about the climate, about our politics, the state of democracy, about the way we practice? As the architecture of our planet accelerates into a state of environmental degradation and unprecedented change we are likely to experience a complex emotional response.” James Soane
Our position has evolved over a number of years and has at its root the idea that often work is informed not by a grand theory, but by a cumulative process intuitively drawing on lived experiences, memories and readings.
In 2015 James was invited to collaborate with Will Hunter to explore setting up a new School of Architecture. In 2016 the LSA (London School of Architecture) was born. James wrote and ran the Critical Practice modules and acted as a Director until 2021. Between 2022 and 2024 he was a Fellow of the school and taught ‘Humanity and the Planet’. He has also written extensively and presented at academic conferences. You can read his collected essays here.
