STEPHEN BATES

Tent poles in the ground

Book launch & Talk
Thursday 12 June 2025   7pm

Tent poles in the ground is a collection of twenty-one texts by Stephen Bates. Like the three-volume collection of Papers (2001, 2007, 2016) written with Jonathan Sergison, Tent poles testifies to the importance of writing as part of a form of practice that includes building and teaching.
The texts included are part of the process of developing and testing ideas in Sergison Bates’ London studio and at the Chair of Urbanism and Housing at TU München. Covering a range of themes, from ;domesticity to the city and the inescapable challenges of designing sustainably in a climate crisis, they record both the fundamental principles that inform his approach to architecture and the shifts in thinking that have come about in thirty years of practice..

Stephen Bates is an architect and educator.
Having graduated from the Royal College of Art in 1989 and gained professional experience in London and Barcelona, Stephen established Sergison Bates architects in 1996, together with Jonathan Sergison.
The practice has completed several critically acclaimed projects in the UK and across Europe and has won several prestigious awards, among them the Erich Schelling Prize and Heinrich Tessenow Gold Medal. They are currently in the process of delivering significant international cultural commissions, such as the KANAL cultural centre in Brussels and the Leuven Performing Arts Quarter.
Stephen has taught throughout his professional life, first at the Architectural Association in London, and subsequently as Visiting Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne (EPFL), the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura (ESARQ), the Universidad Internacional de Catalunya (UIC/ETSAB) in Barcelona, the Oslo School of Architecture, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and the University of Antwerp. Since 2009 he has been Professor of Urbanism and Housing at the Technische Universität in Munich.
He regularly contributes to international architectural publications and has published several books, among them a three-volume collection of essays, Papers (2001), Papers 2 (2007) and Papers 3 (2016), Buildings (2012), Lineage and Legacy: a certain modernism in Cadaqués (2021), KANAL #1: Thinking (2022), and Tent poles in the ground (2025). Through his work in practice, writing and teaching he has explored the role of architecture at all scales, from city-making to domesticity, rethinking conventions and designing buildings that are rooted in place, engaged with the historical dimension of the existing urban fabric, and responsive to the challenges of environmental, economic and social sustainability.

www.sergisonbates.co.uk
www.instagram.com/sergisonbates_london