ƒ(𝒏) Architects was founded in 2020 by Ross Neal RIBA ARB.
Ross is a chartered architect and certified passive house designer, with more than 15 years experience in practice and has directly contributed to completed building projects valued at more than £40Million to date.
He has a lot of experience in private and specialist housing between £15k and £15million as well as community, ecclesiastical and commercial projects and continues to work part time at Halsall Lloyd Partnership where he has been responsible for several high-profile schemes across the Northwest in the past 7 years. Ross founded ƒ(𝒏) to enable him to complete a broader range of projects and to undertake work directly for and on behalf of community.
He has also worked as a design tutor with Liverpool John Moores University since 2022. When he’s not designing or tutoring Ross regularly plays trumpet and EWI with a number of Liverpool-based music groups.
Why ƒ(𝒏)?
Literally: ƒ<function of> (𝒏)<number of archetypes>
The practice name is originally derived from Ross’s research masters thesis entitled ‘𝒏 house’, written in 2011. The thesis analysed the inventive ways that dwellings are adapted and inhabited in contrast to the rigid and repetitive design patterns from which they were built, inspired by Robin Evan’s essay Toward Anarchitecture and Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language.
Patterns permeate architecture from modular kitchens to terraced houses to tower blocks to entire cities. A design that has been repeated ‘𝒏’ times may be expected to impose a broadly uniform set of constraints upon it’s users, but each iteration will be adapted in any number of ways by users as a reflection of their functional requirements and socioeconomic and cultural values. In this way buildings are less a static end-point of the architectural process and more the establishment of a (slow-motion) material system that simultaneously shapes and is shaped by their inhabitants. The end of an architect’s direct control over a pattern marks the point at which user control begins, being a function ‘ƒ‘ of the adaptability of the archetype and external forces on the user (tenure, permissions, cost etc.).
Function follows form as form follows function is not how modern architects have tended to think, however this seed of an idea has grown into an obsession for the design of unique, adaptive and intelligent interventions to put the needs of user ahead of other considerations, ensuring that the client’s functional requirements ƒ are always in control of the patterns (𝒏) in their lives.