Photographing the Winners of the 2024 Architecture Today Awards, in 2025

There is a moment, quiet, often uncomfortable, when architecture stops performing for the camera.

The banners come down. The champagne glasses are washed and shelved. The press images slip into the archive. What remains is the building as it actually is: carrying people, weather, habit, compromise. This is the moment that matters. This is when architecture begins to tell the truth.

I have learnt, over decades, that buildings need to be revisited. Not ceremonially but with patience and attention. Architecture does not reveal its value at the point of handover. It reveals itself slowly, through use, through wear. It reveals itself in the morning queue, the late meeting, the gloomy afternoon. It reveals itself when nobody is trying to impress anyone.

The Architecture Today Awards are unique in their approach. The jury looks for intelligence, generosity, resilience. They listen. They invite conversation. They create a space where entrants can speak honestly about what worked, what didn’t, what surprised them, what failed and what endured. This is not judgement as spectacle; it is judgement as reflection. A shared reckoning with reality.

In those conversations, faults are not disqualifying. Nor are successes ornamental. What matters is whether the architecture has learned something, about people, about climate, about time, and whether it has been generous enough to pass that learning on. This is architecture understood not as a finished object, but as an ongoing civic act.

My own contribution to this process takes place in winter. Early mornings. Short days. There are no props. No stylists. No borrowed plants or freshly cleaned windows. The building stands as it is, with the people who rely on it every day. Coats hung over chairs. Mud at the threshold. But, importantly, this is not a limitation; it is where we find an architecture to celebrate.

This is where real values become visible.

The values we seek are not heroic. They are not loud. They are everyday, ordinary, and yet quietly exceptional. I am looking for an architecture that earns trust through consistency, through generosity, through care. Each building an ark, a lifeboat, a vessel to protect and serve, to carry hopes, dreams and outcomes.

Good buildings do not ask to be admired. They ask to be relied upon.

What makes architecture valuable, truly valuable, is not how it looks at its most flattering moment, but how it performs at its most unremarkable ones. At nine on a wet Tuesday. At the end of a long week, in poor light, with no audience.

That is where architecture proves its worth. Every hour. Every day.

And it is there, away from the glow, beyond the fanfare, that we should be looking.