It happened one day in early November 2014 when we were having unseasonably good weather and I wasn’t concentrating. I had been approached by a primary school in Camden earlier that summer to give their entrance areas a facelift and resolve a few nagging problems in circulation that had built up over the years, like in most schools. Rhyl Primary School is a Victorian behemoth built from masonry walls half a metre thick as part of the London School Board building programme. Wiith no care for logic, yet, built with such blind magnificence and sincerity that one is left slightly baffled that 100 years later schools can be built with such contempt for time and the future, considering that these are the very commodities in which schools need to be proofing us all against.

I met Ben our structural engineer, that balmy day. As we were looking at the ear-marked rooms that I have been in over and again, he pointed out that a staircase must have once stood in the entrance as the brickwork was patched up in the walls in a diagonal arrangement.

I suddenly felt as if the building was somehow quietly singing to me about a lost moment in its history. I could see and picture this small intervention, I began to notice old ventilation panels half blocked off and fanlights that had been covered up. Of course buildings are not human, but they contain the traces and stories of the lives that have passed through them. Buildings become scarred and ripped apart and adapted, especially if they are allowed to last as long as Rhyl.

I began to think of lost staircases, about the gravity-free stairs of Escher, or the grim etchings of Piranesi’s prisonscapes. I thought about a rainy February visit to the seemingly delight-free world of Bison planks in Derby, where curing staircases are littered in the plant forecourt like scattered leaves. I wondered about the Descending Nude by Duchamp and that the staircase is this essential and timeless architectural entity that makes a meaningful scale even from the most monumental monument. Something to be descended.

I began to think about Rocky running up those stairs in Philedelphia, over and over and getting distracted and mixing this in my mind with the unbuilt Monument to Stalin which has so many stairs it becomes unfathomably big. Could Rocky make it up those stairs? Rocky slow down. Of course he can make it!

I began to think of the stair at the Altes Museum, half inside half outside, how peculiar and domestic and stately all at once.

Still standing in that slightly dusty, school corridor a previous student I had taught, David sprang to mind. His ingenious project for a new art school in Stratford took two identical buildings and interlocked them, but one being in plan and one in section of course! A series of curious and uncanny intersections occured. Most vividly in the staircases, which were imagined as rooms as well as circulation.

All whilst standing there with Ben from Price and Myers. I realised that I wasn’t concentrating again and came too.

So the stair.

Was this the hook that I had been looking for in my quest for a time-based architecture at Rhyl? Could I somehow re-animate the stair in an environment that did not require it? Could it be used as a motif, but sideways and inside out and upside down. Creating nooks in the wrong direction. Stairs to nowhere.

The entrance at Rhyl school quietly acts out its past history in the hidden and fading marks within its structures. Listen a little more closely and you can hear them whispering.

I have recently discovered the delights of the Belgian Coast. A huge swathe of sandy coastline running from Dunkirk to Het Swin. Beautiful. Rugged. Windy. Brownbeige water. Good chips. Good beer. Unnecessarily good ice cream.

I couldn’t help but feel the absence of my countrymen, who largely bypass the region and head south once through the Eurotunnel.

Thinking of their slightly shabbier British cousin resorts that litter the eastern seaboard: I’m thinking of you Cleethorpes and you Skegness and I’m not forgetting you Filey, I have not yet felt the urge to dwell for longer than a few hours in their slightly edge-of-world inky-apocolyptic habitats. Imagine being in Cleethorpes when the actual apocalypse comes. Clutching a battered sausage and a monstrously large portion of vinegar drenched chips.

In Der Haan there exists - perhaps having been there for some small eternity - a series of small whitewashed timber structures jostling for position on the beachfront in the manner of London garages or Mancunian snickets.

When one is opened - which seems to be a rather occasional instance - therein can be observed a small but not insignificant smorgasbord of beach-related delights and appendages; inflatables, buckets, boots, windbreaks, rugs, dog food, beer, water, plastic moulds, nets, parasols, hampers, cushions, towels, champagne glasses, bottle openers, coats, hats, kites, tackle, body-boards, knives, spades, bins, lighter fluid, mini-barbeques.

The romance contained in these condensed worlds seems to be the ability to exist for more than a few moments on this threshold of the wilderness. That you can watch a swelling tide emerge from the outer channel, that you can see the tide come in, that you can feel the weather change direction; all with your bottle of Tizer and radio fuzzing away in the background. Get more than one friend into your miniature palace and the place changes into an extended campfire. Harbouring stories and gossip as you gaze out to the sea.

In this sedate wilderness, these cabins and light enclosures become like extensions of the campfire, places to collect around and share stories. Recent conquests of waves or sand dunes, mid-distance stories about work happenings or long-distance memories of childhood. A carapace of personal and shared mythologies.

It was these qualities that we were seeking in our design for a series of new shelters for Bexhill Seafront. Here a smooth concrete base acts as an anchor for a tripartite wing-like structure that calls to mind the sails of windsurfs. The vast expanse of the sea is condensed into a small viewing position which accentuates the experience of weather conditions. The scattering sound of rainfall is amplified by the polycarbonate roof. Intermittent sunny spells cast shadows through the dense weave of the timber roof structure. Wind rushes over the aerodynamic form to allow you to feel close, but separate from the power of the storm.

In these moments the visitor might feel connected to a wilder place and possibly even open up a place of reflection.