Asking, Looking, Playing, Making: a nature-focused design process

Anna Liu and Mike Tonkin, co-founders and directors of Tonkin Liu Architects: Architecture, Landscape, Art, will discuss their new book, Asking, Looking, Playing, Making: a nature-focused design process (RIBA Publishing, April 2025)

Tonkin Liu maintains that there is a current need to achieve beautiful buildings rooted in a sense of place. To do this, applying insights from their practice and teaching, Asking, Looking, Playing, Making enables readers to follow a tried-and-tested, structured and holistic design process that is beneficial across a variety of disciplines from architecture to art and landscape design, and links placemaking to technical innovation.

An investigative storytelling process in four concise, adaptive stages, and deploying appropriate creative tools, draws on influences from culture and nature as part of investigating the specific circumstances of the project.

Cover of Asking, Looking, Playing, Making: a nature-focused design process

The first two stages, Asking and Looking, work together to set the design intent, with the Asking stage responding to the client’s brief by exploring the project’s subjects of nature, people and place. It sets a series of provocations in the form of riddles that instigate further research. The Looking stage explores influences beyond architectural conventions to set a series of quests for the design process.
The Playing and Making stages also work in tandem and can be compared to RIBA work stages 2, 3 and 4. Design outcomes are evaluated critically enabling practitioners to complete each stage with a storytelling device that encapsulates and delivers the evolving design intent in a holistic story.

The book is an evolution of the first book of same title published in 1999 by Black Dog, focused on learning from practice and teaching.
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Speaker biograpies

Mike Tonkin qualified as an architect in 1989, the year he set up his practice. He graduated from the Royal College of Art in London in 1986 after receiving first-class honours at Leeds Polytechnic, having completed an apprenticeship as an architectural technician with training at Bath Technical College. His interest in nature led to his qualification as a landscape architect in 2014.

Mike has taught for many years, including for a decade at the University of Bath and as a Unit Master at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, the University of Westminster and London Metropolitan. He has been an external examiner for the master’s courses at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, and a longstanding visiting critic. He completed his PhD at the University of Bath and is currently a Visiting Professor of Architecture at the Manchester School of Architecture.

Anna Liu qualified as an architect in 2002, after completing her Master of Architecture at Columbia University, New York, in 1994 and a liberal arts education encompassing chemistry and comparative literature at Smith College Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1987. Her experience has drawn from working in the UK, China and Japan where she discovered architecture, the US where she grew up and in Taiwan where she was born.

Anna was a Quality Review panellist for the Euston HS2 Station and London Legacy Development Corporation. She has taught as a Unit Master at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, the University of Westminster and London Metropolitan, and has been an external examiner at the Bartlett School of Architecture and at the University of Dundee. She is a trustee of the Open City charity, a Visiting Practice Professor at Sheffield School of Architecture, and an MArch external examiner at London Metropolitan University.

Tonkin Liu: Bridging teaching, research and practice, Tonkin Liu’s placemaking design approach has established a reputation for delivering award-winning projects that range from architecture to medical inventions, and from artworks to landscapes. Each project finds its creative origin in both cultural and natural contexts. The practice’s ambition has consistently been to bring people closer to nature, unifying nature and human nature.

WEB: tonkinliu.co.uk
INSTAGRAM: @tonkinliu

ABOUT: Asking, Looking, Playing, Making: a nature-focused design process

The talk is chaired by Lucy Bullivant Hon FRIBA, Trustee, Temple Bar Trust.

Copies of the book will be sold at the event by our collaborator, The Gilded Acorn bookshop based at 1 Portugal Street, WC2A 2ES opposite the Marshall Building on the LSE campus.
https://uk.bookshop.org/shop/TheGildedAcorn
https://linktr.ee/thegildedacornbookshop

We would be delighted if you would join us for a networking reception with the speaker and audience members after the main event .

Please note: Temple Bar will be open for ticket holders from 18:05, please arrive in good time to be checked in and seated by 18:20. Our public talks start at promptly at 18:25.