East Quay is not simply a building—it is a proposition for a different kind of architectural practice. Situated in Watchet, a small coastal town in one of the UK’s least socially mobile districts, it exemplifies architecture as a form of research, pedagogy, and transformation. Designed by Invisible Studio and initiated by Onion Collective CIC—a female-led, community-rooted organisation—East Quay challenges dominant models of commissioning, authorship, and value in the built environment. Its contribution to the culture and knowledge of architecture is both radical and generative: it expands what architecture is, what it can do, and who gets to define it.
This is a building that materialises a method. Rather than proceeding from a conventional brief with fixed spatial and functional parameters, East Quay emerged through years of open-ended community dialogue and strategic experimentation. Its origins lie not in top-down visioning but in grassroots, iterative co-creation. The Onion Collective’s process—conversations rather than consultations, synthesis rather than extraction—foregrounded local values, aspirations, and capabilities. Invisible Studio responded not with solutions but with questions, using models, sketches, and site strategies to scaffold an evolving collective imagination. In this way, the architecture of East Quay is not the product of a design for a community, but a design with and through one. The architecture itself became the medium of co-production.
East Quay is practice-based research made manifest: the building is both the artefact and the method. The process of its design and construction constitutes a live research inquiry into participatory authorship, spatial justice, and emergent vernaculars. In its rejection of fixed typologies and hierarchical expertise, the project contributes to growing discourses around situated knowledge (Haraway, 1988), feminist design ethics, and relational spatial production. It offers a powerful counter-model to development logics in which aesthetics, economy, and functionality are too often isolated from context, culture, and care.
This methodological openness—where the brief is co-evolved rather than imposed—makes East Quay a compelling example of architecture as an epistemic practice. It embodies what Hélène Frichot terms architectural theory-in-action: an unfolding logic that both reflects and reshapes its socio-political context. In doing so, it challenges normative models of architectural production predicated on expertise, hierarchy, and control.
The architectural expression of East Quay reflects these ambitions. It is formally playful, materially grounded, and spatially generous. The use of pink sand from local quarries roots the building in its geology; the diverse, asymmetrical volumes echo the accretive, adaptive logic of vernacular settlements. The design is deliberately “open-grained,” borrowing from Richard Sennett’s terminology to describe urban conditions that favour porosity, interaction, and incompletion. Rather than a monument to completion, East Quay offers a porous and flexible spatial matrix that accommodates multiple uses, unexpected adjacencies, and evolving civic life. It understands incompleteness not as a flaw, but as a virtue—aligning with Sennett’s notion of the “open city,” where overlapping, contingent functions generate complexity and conviviality. This is architecture not as monument but as scaffolding for civic life—non-prescriptive, unprecious, and radically inclusive.
Significantly, East Quay redefines vernacularity itself. Rather than replicating historical forms or materials as shorthand for local identity, it proposes that the truly vernacular is that which is initiated, governed, and owned by the people who inhabit it. The community-led origins of East Quay make it more locally situated than any stylistic pastiche. It is a vernacular of governance, not merely of form. This insight offers a crucial theoretical and practical contribution to contemporary architectural discourse, reframing the vernacular as a procedural rather than aesthetic category.
Moreover, East Quay prompts a reassessment of architectural authorship. The architect’s role here is not that of visionary creator, but of facilitator, provocateur, and collaborator. Invisible Studio did not impose a singular vision but choreographed a process—knowing when to step forward and when to step aside. This agility is not a retreat from expertise but a redefinition of it: architecture as the capacity to shape conditions, hold complexity, and translate collective desire into spatial possibility.
East Quay also challenges prevailing models of architectural impact. Within institutional contexts such as the REF, impact is often instrumentalised: measured in economic outputs, visitor numbers, or awards. While East Quay has achieved all of these—it is award-winning, economically generative, and culturally celebrated—its deeper impact lies elsewhere. It lies in how it expands the field’s understanding of architecture’s civic and epistemic role. It makes visible an alternative paradigm in which architectural knowledge is produced relationally—through the interplay of community desire, spatial imagination, and shared material experimentation.
The building’s cultural influence is already visible. It is cited internationally as a model for community-led development, featured in exhibitions, films, and journal articles. It offers a compelling case study for students, practitioners, and policy-makers exploring new models of civic infrastructure, spatial agency, and design for societal transformation. It has influenced local authorities reconsidering asset transfer and participatory commissioning. It has entered the architectural imaginary not as a style but as a methodology.
This is a building that contributes not only to Watchet’s future but to architecture’s future. It challenges the academy to expand its metrics of excellence to include lived consequence, civic ownership, and processual intelligence. It invites practitioners to rethink architectural research as that which is spatial, collective, and materially situated. It exemplifies a situated, inclusive, and imaginative form of architectural research that is urgently needed in times of social fragmentation and climate crisis.
In terms of academic contribution, East Quay sits within and extends a lineage of critical architectural practice informed by assemblage theory (DeLanda, 2016), socio-material entanglement (Latour, 2005), and feminist spatial theory (Gibson-Graham, 2006; Haraway, 2016). It demonstrates how buildings can be both spatial and political acts—sites where competing narratives, values, and actors negotiate shared futures. As such, it contributes to architectural theory not by abstraction but by doing: a form of knowing-in-practice. East Quay also contributes meaningfully to debates within architectural academia and practice around the role of design in processes of social transformation. It demonstrates that high-quality architecture can emerge not in spite of democratic design processes but because of them. The radicalism of East Quay lies in its refusal to separate social ambition from architectural ambition.
East Quay offers a transformative model of architectural production. It embodies an alternative future in which buildings are not just constructed but co-evolved; where design processes are not extractive but reciprocal; and where architecture is re-centred as a public, imaginative, and ethical act. East Quay offers the field a new vocabulary for practice-based research—one in which architecture acts not as representation, but as enactment. Its impact on architectural knowledge is not symbolic but structural. It has changed what architecture can be, how it can be made, and who it can be made by. As the profession reckons with climate breakdown, social inequity, and the failures of top-down development, East Quay provides a vital precedent. It is architecture as proposition, as process, and as possibility—both a product of its place and a contributor to the evolving culture of architecture itself.
Watch Piers Taylor of Invisible Studio and Georgie Grant of Onion Collective CiC discuss the EAST QUAY WATCHET project HERE
#eastquatwatchet
