A zest for life – everyone’s – drives Katy Marks’ Citizens Design Bureau, which spreads a wide net to add value to all it works with, discovers Chris Foges
Stepping into the shopfront studio of Citizens Design Bureau you get an immediate sense of what the Hackney-based practice is about. It’s a happy place. The team of six squeezed around a single desk is all smiles as I arrive. Paint pots and plaster casts tucked into every corner testify to a love of making. Sheaves of photographs and project souvenirs almost cover the brick walls. ‘We are not minimalists’, says founder Katy Marks. The profusion reveals a remarkable breadth. Theatres are a specialism, but CDB does everything from conservation to low-energy newbuilds, product design to business strategy. The easy-going Marks is clearly an excellent juggler, able to keep a lot of balls in the air and to throw them high – even, as I discover, in the most difficult circumstances.
An appetite for variety was already established when Liverpool-born Marks launched her practice in 2013, aged 34. After studies in Glasgow and Madrid she led an arts project for the UN in Soweto, dovetailing the interests of sponsors and local people. Then, after a Cambridge masters in environmental design, she co-founded the Impact Hub network of coworking spaces. That gave a useful commercial grounding, but the pull of architecture led Marks to begin a seven-year ‘apprenticeship’ at Haworth Tompkins.
Her role as project architect for the Stirling Prize-winning Everyman Theatre in Liverpool was particularly gratifying. ‘Working in the North West feels like home’. She credits the city’s character for some of the unselfconscious, heart-on-sleeve qualities in CDB’s work, along with her wider roots from Jerusalem to Tripoli.
CDB grew steadily: an atmospheric café for the Royal Court Theatre, with Lyndon Goode; a competition win to remodel a Walthamstow church. But in 2017 its upward trajectory halted abruptly as Marks was diagnosed with cancer.
She was honest with clients, and some cut ties. ‘No hard feelings’. Staff had to go. So it was with a small team, while undergoing debilitating treatment, that Marks delivered Manchester’s Jewish Museum – a filigree-patterned Corten extension to a restored historic synagogue, rich in material detail and suffused with warmth and optimism. A bakery at the heart of the museum enriches the sensory experience, and there’s a symbolic emphasis on things that connect different cultures. Its harmonious coherence saw Marks named 2023 RIBA North West Project Architect of the Year, which seems something of an understatement.
How could she summon the focus to work in those circumstances? ‘It felt like I’d been climbing my little wooden ladder, and looked down to see someone with a saw,’ she recalls. ‘It was difficult to juggle but I was determined not to let it crush me’.
The experience has reinforced a strong sense of purpose in the practice. ‘I want to spend my time on things that are meaningful or make a difference,’ says Marks. ‘Otherwise what’s the point?’ From the outset CDB has been frank about having its own agenda for every project, whether that’s some social benefit or the pleasure to be had from doing it. She’s less concerned about putting her own visual stamp on buildings. ‘Our projects are like a stick of rock – cut them anywhere and you see the client.’
She points to CDB’s recent transformation of the Jackson’s Lane centre for circus arts, where volcanic colours and slightly ramshackle fixtures and furnishings allude to the company’s playful nature. Less overt are myriad practical improvements, revised at pace to save the project faced with funding cuts. ‘Successful buildings need both rigorous practicality and soul,’ says Marks.
Rebuilding an arts-oriented practice after Covid also required deft manouvering, especially as Marks wants to avoid the bread-and-butter projects that sustain many architects in the sector.
Work with theatres continues, and grass-roots organisations too – on the day we met an east London community centre had gone in for planning – but CDB’s client list now includes blue-chip names of the cultural world. Seven new galleries are coming at the V&A, where miniature glassware will be shown against colourful Venetian mosaics. And for the National Trust, a visitor centre in the grade-I-listed Shugborough Estate in Staffordshire. With fat cylindrical columns made of straw bales, it makes a serious bid for whole-life zero-carbon status.
CDB is also branching out into residential design. An overhaul of six HKPA-designed houses on Hampstead Heath combines low-energy design with the conservation of 1950s modernism. For Hackney Council there’s competition-winning terraced housing on garage sites.
If toggling between technically demanding sectors wasn’t enough, Marks has launched a company making single-cup bras for women who have had mastectomies. She’ll spend one day prototyping at the sewing machine, the next on articles promoting the -Uno brand. ‘We want to work on things that can be transformative; if that means straying into new fields, so be it’.
Even for Marks the mix might be a bit rich: ‘A living room full of boxes has been hellish’. She aims to employ people to look after the start-up, and is open to the idea of a partner at CDB but has no desire to grow. With the unpredictability of life and work, the key to keeping things on track is not numbers but juggling. ‘And I’ve learned that I don’t need to climb a ladder’, she says. ‘We are making great stuff with confidence and integrity, and that’s really all we need.’