Amber Godfrey

Amber Godfrey is a London-based architectural designer interested in sustainable and equitable design. Originally from Jamaica, Amber moved to the UK to study at Oxford Brookes University, and went on to spend two years at Michaelis Boyd Associates. During her time as an architectural assistant, she gained experience in residential, interior and commercial projects. Here she designed and built pavilion for the London Festival of Architecture.

At the Royal College of Art, she looked at sustainable design from two angles: material research and form. Her first-year work at the RCA gained her the RIBA Wren Scholarship and mentorship with Hopkins architectural practice.

Her thesis Thermal Justice considers the notion of the sealed interior which has been created to facilitate mechanically cooled spaces. The work presents ideas and questions focused around comfort, identity, and future climates.

How can a diverse and adaptive model of thermal comfort inform a more thermally just architecture?

The reliance on mechanical systems of interior climate control have resulted in homogenous architectural landscapes, a diffusion of social spaces for gathering and a dichotomy between the interior and exterior. Perhaps most concerning, this reliance on energy significantly contributes to our current ecological crisis; the irony is of course that a thermally uniform interior contributes to an increasingly unpredictable exterior. We must recognise that buildings not only create interior climates, but also alter exterior climates. The purpose of this exploration is not intended to be anti-technology, but to acknowledge and consider the consequence of our current reliance on these systems.

The first project -The Temple of Thermal Diversity - responds to the unit brief for a design for a pavilion situated in Hyde Park. The Pavilion explores ideas of adaptive comfort and thermal diversity.

The second project - Thermal Justice - looks at Jamaica, where the heat is often oppressive and energy theft is widespread. More and more, developers build buildings unable to be passively comfortable in the name of cost efficiency and ‘modern architecture’, and tenants live with the exceedingly high cost of being cool. As such the design intends to explore a more thermally just architecture. The project is interested in creating site specific climatic interventions, searching for openness and adaptability. The political space, in this case responding to a competition for a New Parliament, presents an opportunity to dissolve the hierarchy and barriers created to accommodate mechanical cooling. Dissolving the barrier between interior and exterior will have effects on the way politics are shaped and the culture of assembly.