The principals of London-based studio 6a architects have been described as architectural detectives. Founded in 2001 by Tom Emerson and Stephanie Macdonald, who were joined in 2010 by Owen Lo Watson, the firm eschews the blank-slate approach, viewing design as an accumulation of material, social, and cultural history. Though often understated, 6a’s work is far from neutral — for them, any claim to impartiality in architecture is “passive aggressive.” Raven Row, the East London exhibition space they completed in 2009, remains one of the clearest examples of their approach. The conversion of a pair of 18th-century silk merchants’ houses, whose initial grandeur had suffered fire, alteration, neglect, and subsequent repair, the project treated those layers not as problems to resolve but as different histories to be made visible all at once. That same sensibility informs the forthcoming Fashion Museum Bath, set to open in 2030 in a landmarked 1920s post office in the UNESCO World Heritage city. Working alongside exhibition designers JA Projects and Sarah Price Landscapes, 6a are shaping a home for a collection that highlights materials, display, bodies, and changing ideas of taste. As Macdonald points out, fashion has been in the firm’s orbit right from the start, since its very first project was a Savile Row showroom for Oki-ni, a pioneering online clothing platform. Since then, the studio has worked with Paul Smith and JW Anderson, completed Blue Mountain School — an East London hybrid that combines a fashion archive, a gallery, a restaurant, and a design space — and designed a photography studio for Juergen Teller, which often appears in his shoots, including a famous foxy snap featuring Charlotte Rampling. It was also Teller who photographed Emerson, Macdonald, and Watson for PIN–UP at 6a Orde Hall Street, the Bloomsbury address that gave the practice its name.

Billie Muraben: Have you been in this building since you started 6a in 2001?

Tom Emerson: Since the late 1990s, actually, before we opened the office.

Owen Lo Watson: And who were your neighbors?

TE: A little band from Bristol… Massive Attack. It was very cool.

Stephanie Macdonald: Massive Attack’s albums would be delivered here — one morning the whole alleyway was full of them. Apparently The Face started here too.

TE: We got the digital audio tape for Mezzanine [Massive Attack’s third album, released in 1998]. After they left, we eventually took over their side of the building. Parts of the original 6a used to be outside, and the office was upstairs. It’s changed a lot over the decades.

SM: When we started joining the two buildings, we knew there were a couple of vaults underground. There were two blocked-up doors, and the vaults were full of rubble from the 1930s — it used to be cheaper to leave it on site, though it may also have been for bomb protection. We cleared it all out and found a brick well, 2 meters deep, with groundwater.

BM: It’s so nice out here in your garden!

SM: There’s very little soil but enough for a tree and a Tetrapanax and a lot of plants in pots. It’s amazing how much grows. In the city I think everyone needs fragments of planting to collect sunlight and seasons — you don’t need to have a view or a big garden.

OLW: The garden used to be our test bed for making.

SM: It’s been through so many lives, hasn’t it?

BM: I wanted to ask you about Richard Wentworth, the artist, curator, and educator. You’ve said that he taught you “how to read the fabric that you build with” — that you can read a whole history of the world in a single brick.

TE: Our first encounter with Richard was at the Royal College of Art, in the second half of the 90s, a big parametric moment in architecture. He would talk about being attentive to the everyday. It really opened up an alternative position in an era of the biggest icons of all the icons.

SM: Through Richard’s work, I felt like I suddenly understood what building was. He has such a beautiful, human reading of the city. I started to understand a methodology of building through phenomena like “sidedness,” rather than thinking about façades or care or survey — looking at the inventory of what’s already there, and at the languages and narratives we’re engaging with.

TE: He’s most interested in how we look at things and interpret what they say, rather than whether that reading is historically exact. It’s a useful way of seeing as an architect, because your job is to invent new things. We’re not conservation architects. At the Fashion Museum in Bath, we aren’t remaking the 1929 remake of 1780. It’s more about noticing things — an interesting shadow, for instance. It might be there because of a Neoclassical cornice, but it’s the shadow that matters, not the Classical language. One of Richard’s mischievous lecture questions was, “How many of you chose your own clothes?” Everyone tentatively put their hand up, and he said, “Right, in my generation we did not.” He was making the point that culture and identity had changed. If you were a certain gender, race, or class, your clothes were largely set. In the 1960s, it wasn’t about which jeans you had, but whether you had jeans at all. Two generations later, we’re in a world of multiplicities, where there are 20 ways of wearing a white shirt. That’s one of the things that will be so interesting at the Fashion Museum.

OLW: Doris Langley Moore, the historian and collector who founded what would become the Fashion Museum, focused on the evolution of textiles and costume, and what it represented in society and culture.

SM: She was a real polymath.

OLW: She was a scholar of costume and the first person to make a BBC film in color. She campaigned for color, because it was a six-part fashion documentary [Men, Women and Clothes, 1957]. You can watch it on YouTube; they’re all speaking in clipped accents.

TE: In one episode, she traces the cut of dresses from the early 19th century through the 1950s alongside architecture — the straight, high-waisted silhouettes of Neoclassicism, then Gothic, and so on. Her point was that these weren’t mere dressmakers’ whims but part of much broader cultural shifts.

SM: It was the Zeitgeist. She also challenged who had the authority to write about clothes — until then, it had mostly been men. At the museum, she reframed her collection of 5,000 pieces as fashion, showing them with accessories, which hadn’t really been done before.

OLW: In addition to Doris Langley Moore’s foundational collection, the museum preserves donated wardrobes like Margot Fonteyn’s, with 1920s Chanel and Schiaparelli.

SM: Once, when we were visiting, the curators asked what we wanted to see, and Owen said, “Alison Smithson’s silver suit with purple boots.” And they had it.

OLW: Alison and Peter Smithson had appeared in a 1970s BBC documentary discussing “streets in the sky” and various urban principles [The Smithsons on Housing, 1970]. At one point Alison is wearing what looks like a spacesuit — silver jacket, silver bellbottoms — talking about a masterplan in France. You never see the boots. But when the curator pulled the suit out of the box from beneath Peter’s homemade Liberty-print paisley shirts, there they were — silver boots with purple cuffs.

SM: The museum also has an incredible glove collection. You’ll see Margot Fonteyn’s right next to Oliver Cromwell’s.

OLW: That was a nutty moment. They opened the box and there was this mad, long-fingered pair of gloves.

SM: They were beautifully crafted, so ornamental, but you had a visceral reaction.

OLW: It was like, these are the hands of the murderer of the Irish, right in front of me! When you’re that close to costume, or someone’s dress, it’s as if the person is standing there with you. That’s the power of the Fashion Museum collection — it’s very immediate.

TE: The next glove was Elizabeth II’s coronation glove, then the Apollo 11 space glove, and then a prop glove from Star Wars. So in five gloves you went from ballet, to treacherous history, to reassuring ritual, to technology, and finally to fantasy.

BM: With something as recognizable as a glove, you can move through all that information quite easily because it’s happening through an object you understand. If a film or book went from ballet, to Cromwell, to Elizabeth II, to Apollo 11, and to Star Wars in quick succession, it would make your head spin.

SM: The museum is committed to setting its collections in a much wider context, beyond the makers. Bath has such a long history as a center of fashion, a place for promenading, for what we do when we communicate with fashion. The building we’re working on was built as post office by the Government Department of Works in the interwar period, and was later put to commercial use. Although it was designed as a public building, it was rather inward looking. We’re thinking about how to connect it to the public realm. We’ve lowered the ground-floor windows to become glazed doors onto a new public piazza; there will be views out of the galleries above; and we’re returning to the old technology of awnings to improve the building’s thermal performance.

BM: The yellow awnings you’ve designed remind me of those at the Aaltos’ Paimio Sanatorium.

TE: It’s one of those incomprehensible lapses in good thinking. Since early Modernism, and before, external blinds were known to be incredibly effective. For some reason, in Britain, whenever you pitch them to a client, they say, “Oh no, they go wrong.” What’s wrong with the blinds in Britain?

OLW: What’s interesting is that in Bath, it’s a massively forgotten history. We did loads of archival research, from oil paintings to early photography, showing that Bath used to be full of awnings. There was some scrutiny from conservation, because most of them were removed in the interwar period and after the Second World War. When Bath became a UNESCO World Heritage Site, its appearance was effectively frozen. It’s a prettified, picturesque image of Bath, when actually it had a lot more character.

TE: One of the things I find interesting about the Fashion Museum is that the content has two extremes. It’s the most universal thing you could possibly exhibit, because everybody is involved, and yet these are some of the most fragile things to conserve and display. A painting show somehow makes sense because not that many people have paintings at home, so you go to a purpose-built building to see them. Whereas with a fashion museum, it’s like, “Mm-hmm, it’s a bit like a shop.” No, it’s not. It’s got history. It’s precious. It’s full of life.

BM: We’re taught quite young how to behave in a museum. But with clothing, the instinct is to want to touch it, or try it on, which must complicate how you think about displaying it.

OLW: Yes. We did an exhibition at the Hepworth Wakefield with Jonathan Anderson [Disobedient Bodies, 2017], and the show was about putting fashion and art on an equal footing — you couldn’t touch either. But in one room, we worked with Jonathan to make huge, 6-meter-tall jumpers with big, wobbly arms, and kids could run underneath them and play.

SM: It was about de-plinthing it, while raising the level of say a Dior dress to that of a Henry Moore sculpture in terms of importance, impact, and cultural significance.

BM: Have you found that pieces from the Bath Fashion Museum’s collection have informed your thinking about the interior design?

TE: It’s more in the techniques — pleating, edging, hanging, tightening. Of course, it has to be abstracted to a certain degree. Bernini was famous for carving fabric in stone, but I’m not sure we’re going to get much Renaissance detailing in there… But there are certain things we’re attentive to, like when something looks like a seam.

SM: It’s coming in now as we get to the layer of finishes. So much of the structure is already there, and we’re working with it quite asymmetrically, so it isn’t something that’s explicit in the plan.

OLW: We’re hoping the rotunda will become a moment for display, where we can think about retail histories and vitrines. People will enter through the original foyer of the post office, whose mosaic floor we’re restoring as we return the building to a civic function. The garden, designed by Sarah Price Landscapes, speaks to the collection more obliquely, through ornament and nature’s place in fashion. The new stair hall and learning space are timber-framed and stone-clad, with the stone suggesting sweeping fabric. The materials have also been chosen for their reduced carbon footprint.

SM: We went to a local mine because there’s concern about Bath stone running out, and much of it is reserved for conservation. We wanted to find a way of using the chunks of stone left in the old mines, with as little processing as possible. It’s also about looking at Bath stone as a typology — from the Romans to the Georgians and eventually to this flattened supermarket industrialized stone.

BM: How did you approach designing Juergen Teller’s studio?

OLW: It’s funny, he wasn’t meant to shoot there, but we designed every room with the idea that there might be a shoot in it.

TE: “I’m not going to shoot,” he said, and knowing how he works, you think, “Yes — until you do.”

OLW: And then week one, he’s shooting on the roof, he’s shooting in the storeroom.

BM: That’s probably how he experiences space, as a view through his camera.

SM: And as a way of understanding it.

TE: And setting up situations. Those situations need some kind of spatial or lighting event around them. There’s a picture of a guy up a ladder, with all the neighbors’ satellite dishes in the background.

SM: I see pictures in magazines all the time with the blockwork in the background, and I think, “Oh, that’s our building.” Beyoncé’s in there, or Charlotte Rampling with a fox.

OLW: The recent Givenchy shoot is probably the most glamorous a services engineer’s equipment has ever been.

TE: Note to your younger architect self: do a project for a photographer in order to get a constant stream of images of your work.

SM: In the background of one of his pictures, there’s a boundary wall that we kept. We try to look for the beauty in what’s already there. What’s the inventory of a place? At the Fashion Museum, the back of the Post Office has these beautiful big chunks of stone that weren’t valued before. Now, from the new staircase, that’s what you see. It’s about viewing things differently and creating new material relationships.

OLW: I think architecture is going through a phase where you have to show how materially considerate you’ve been. We’ve been talking a lot about how, just because a structure is timber, it doesn’t have to look “woody.” The question is, how do you dress the interiors, the timber frames and ceilings, so they introduce another beat to the building?

SM: Tom gets really antsy about this. How would you describe it?

TE: When architecture has too much virtue signaling — everything is some shade of brown, earth, timber — you think, “Actually, there’s no reason these materials have to be expressed that way.” It’s almost an aesthetic of good intentions.

BM: It won’t actually be effective as a method if it always has to look like a timber frame, because then there’s no room for anything to develop from there. People won’t want to adopt it, and it removes the space for imagination.

TE: And the potential for things to be astonishing. In 20 years, people won’t think, “Hmm, that must have a very low carbon footprint.” It’ll just look dated.

BM: Everything is hemp.

TE: Yeah, it’ll look as dated as my parents’ wallpaper from the 70s, which was made of hemp.

SM: It was hessian, actually.

TE: There’s going to be a whole generation of things we’ll react viscerally to, a change in mindset and turning that into an aesthetic. But the fact that we’re reusing a building is probably much more significant in terms of carbon footprint than whether a column or beam is timber. Still, if that beam and column weren’t timber, we’d probably be bad people. [Laughs.]

OLW: The museum is the first to meet the Passivhaus Trust standard for retrofitting existing buildings, and that ambition was set by Bath. Everything is really joined up in the project. It’s a holistic ambition. And it’s data, not an aesthetic.

TE: And it’s great to meet that standard while still allowing the project to be as glamorous, fun, playful, and contrary as it should be.