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. He has directly contributed to completed building projects valued at more than £40Million to date.
He has a lot of experience in social, private and specialist housing between £15k and £15million as well as a broad range of community, ecclesiastical and commercial projects. He continues to work part time at Halsall Lloyd Partnership where he has been responsible for several high-profile schemes across the Northwest. 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 derives from Ross’s MA(Res) thesis entitled ‘𝒏 house’ which 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 of a building begins – a function ‘ƒ‘ of the adaptability of the archetype and external forces on the user (tenure, permissions, cost etc.).
If function follows form as form follows function, then a design simultaneously enables but also limits use for the life of a project. The implications include future adaptability, useful design life, maintenance requirements, embodied carbon and not least the degree of freedom of the users to inhabit their spaces without being encumbered by a static design. This is not how architects tend to think or practice (perhaps explaining the restrictive and short-sighted design exhibited by some buildings) but this seed of an idea has grown into this practice’s obsession for the design of unique, adaptive and intelligent projects that put the user’s needs at the heart of the design process, ensuring our client’s functional ƒ requirements maintain control of the patterns (𝒏) in their lives.