Tom Greenall is a London-based architect who studied at the University of Sheffield before completing his Master’s at the Royal College of Art. He graduated with a distinction in 2009, winning the Will Alsop Award for Urbanism and a place in Building Design’s Class of 2009 – a national student prize given to the top six graduates of the year.
Tom has also completed award-winning buildings with architects DSDHA, whose Christ’s College Secondary School was shortlisted for the 2010 Stirling Prize. He has written for both Building and Building Design magazines.
Having studied under the late Gerrard O’Carroll, Tom Greenall’s work is concerned with critically addressing the world in which we live. He embraces a society that selfishly adapts its value systems in order to maintain the status quo and grapples with the everyday reality of a society that is saturated with contradiction and dilemma.
Since graduating in 2009 Tom Greenall has undertaken a number of commissions for a diverse range of clients, including the Old Vic Theatre, the Architecture Foundation, London Borough of Lambeth and writer Alain de Botton. He has also collaborated with architectural practice SCDLP and with designers House of Jonn. Concurrently Tom Greenall has continued to work with his mentors of more than six years, Deborah Saunt and David Hills, at DSDHA.
Tom’s first completed building, the Canon Popham Foundation Unit in Doncaster, represented a continuation of the practice’s investigation into design for early years education and was honoured with a Royal Institute of British Architects award in 2008. The building’s carved form is a carefully articulated response to both the existing context and the requirements of the brief, while simultaneously addressing the environmental ambitions of the client. The building is entirely clad in one material to further abstract the form, reinforcing the impression that it has been crafted from a single piece.
Qualifying as an architect in 2011, Tom Greenall’s more recent work has emphasised his interest in urban design. The recently completed entrance to Vauxhall Spring Gardens is a radical yet appropriate response to the site’s location on one of London’s most infamous gyratories; it represents the latest outcome of an ongoing master plan that was first developed by DSDHA in 2006.
Through this diverse range of commissions, Tom Greenall has produced projects that rigorously address the notion of the city. Through set design, writing, illustration, exhibition design and architecture, he has sought to challenge received expectations of the built environment and to celebrate contemporary urban culture.
By seductively framing social taboos, Tom Greenall’s work encourages us to consider our own value systems, and in doing so becomes in itself a tool for change.
Tom Greenall’s work has been exhibited in the UK, Dubai and Bangladesh and has been widely published by journals including the Architects’ Journal, Building Design, Building, Design Week and Opera Now.
Tom Greenall has acted as a visiting critic at a number of UK institutions and taught at London Metropolitan University before joining the Royal College of Art in 2011. Tom has also been involved in teaching at the University of Brighton and at the European Architecture Student Assembly (EASA).