About

f(n) Architects is an RIBA Chartered Practice based in Liverpool founded in 2020.

Director – Ross Neal

RIBA ARB MArch PGCert BA(Hons)

Ross has 15 years experience working on hundreds of projects ranging upto £15 million in value and for a variety of clientele. He is also employed by Halsall Lloyd Partnership where he specialises in the design of social housing. He founded f(n) Architects to enable him to complete smaller projects and undertake work for and on behalf of the community.

Ross undertook the Advanced Diploma in Professional Practice in Architecture with the RIBA NW course to fully qualify as an architect in 2019. He studied for his Masters in Architecture at the Manchester School of Architecture and was a member of ‘Atelier CPU’ specialising in Complexity, Planning and Urbanism, graduating in 2018. He previously studied at The University of Plymouth to complete his Bachelors in Architecture in 2010 and also undertook postgraduate study there towards a Masters by Research in Architecture.

Why f(n)?

The name of the practice is derived from Ross’s research masters dissertation entitled ‘n house’, written back in 2011. The essay analysed the often inventive ways that existing houses were adapted and inhabited in relation to the often rigid design ‘patterns’ from which they had been built. Be it terraced houses or stacked apartments, patterned designs replicated ‘n’ times may have been anticipated to have had broadly uniform impacts on the thousands of residents, but had been adapted in any number of interesting and exciting ways reflecting the vary socioeconomic and cultural needs of the users. The buildings were simultaneously shaping and being shaped by the lives of the inhabitants. Over the past 10 years, the seed of this idea grew into an obsession for designing adaptive and intelligent interventions and a compulsion to interrogate and undermine ubiquitous patterns in relation to the overriding functional ‘f‘ requirements of the users.