The purpose and imperatives of architecture are so often lost on a public who are led to focus on image and style. Exhibitions are key to unpacking the complexity of issues, social and environmental that drive the work and make architecture such a fundamentally useful tool for society.

The first was a student proposal for a new Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice that interweaves museum interiors and garden exteriors and in which the memory of the site is revealed and improvised around.

The second, 33 years later, is our ‘Tread Lightly’ project for a cultural trail that spans the mountains of Armenia, an environmental proposal for a 750km Caucasian walking experience that uses the tourist dollar to sustain village economies and celebrate the land, local culture and human contact.

The title of the exhibition, ‘Sensing Place’, expresses my pursuit of architectural solutions that reveal the essence of place whilst pointing to new futures and possibilities.

The Architectural model, rather than the computer image, the sketch or the drawing, is my preferred method of expressing ideas before the building is constructed. Most often the models include the territory that they impact because it is the relationship between building and context that is my passion.

For me architecture is more than form making, it is about casting a broad spell over a wide domain of people and landscape.