By Peter Mance, Director, MAAPS Design & Architecture
Every designer has an origin — a point where observation, curiosity, and making first converge.
For me, the foundation of interior and architectural intervention lies in adaptation: learning to read existing buildings and bring new life to them.
Those early lessons, and the teachers who encouraged them, instilled a lasting belief that design begins with understanding rather than invention — not repair but renewal.
Seeing buildings as layered stories — acts of learning from the existing — formed an enduring discipline of observation, proportion, and empathy that remains the anchor of my practice.
With gratitude to Fred Scott, author of On Altering Architecture (Routledge 2008), whose teaching at Kingston shaped my practice.
My understanding of interior design has always been rooted in the concept of adaptation and breathing new life into old buildings.
From my earliest training, I was drawn to the process of pulling things apart — of excavating, sifting, and examining the layers that lie beneath the visible surface of a building. This curiosity was never about demolition; it was about discovery. The foundation of how and why I design is entwined with the act of re-imagining — understanding what exists so that something new might grow from it.
To strip back is to begin again. It is both inquiry and preparation, a way of setting the stage for the future.
Every existing building carries a memory of how it came to be — the traces of decisions, the residue of time, the improvisations that shape its current state. Stripping back allows us to reveal those layers of intent and accident, to see the building not as a static object but as a continuum of energy and occupation. It’s a process of discovery that turns decay into data, and erosion into insight.
Artists such as Gordon Matta-Clark made this process visible — cutting through the fabric of buildings to expose their inner geometries and tensions. His Conical Intersect (Paris, 1975) sliced through two 17th-century houses to reveal invisible alignments between structure, light, and time. His work was less about destruction than revelation — each incision exposing the logic and fragility of the built world.
As explored in our Mercuriosity feature Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect, his practice offers both an intellectual framework and a creative prompt: the idea that intervention begins with the courage to look closely, to peel back the edges, and to get deep into the intimate fabric of the space.
That same fascination with alignment can be found in the Jantar Mantar observatories of India — vast sculptural instruments designed to track the movements of celestial bodies through light and shadow. Where Matta-Clark revealed the inner geometries of architecture, Jantar Mantar measured the geometry of the universe. Both are acts of calibration — one earthly, one cosmic — each seeking understanding through precision and subtraction.
In design, this search for alignment continues. Stripping back is our way of finding the coordinates between past and future, matter and meaning, human scale and cosmic order.
During my studies with Fred Scott, this approach found its architectural counterpart. In On Altering Architecture, Scott frames stripping back as the essential first act of transformation — “the process by which the interventional designer acquires an understanding of the host building … as preparation for the correspondence between their work and the existing.”
That idea of correspondence — of relationship — evolved in his writing into something more profound: affinity.
Affinity is the quiet empathy that forms between designer and building — a kind of conversation where material, proportion, and memory begin to speak. Through affinity, we sense not only what a structure has been, but what it might yet become.
In our work, affinity enriches everything. It captures the link between the building’s past, its future, and the lives that will pass through. It ensures that invention grows from understanding — that the new belongs to the old without imitation. Affinity transforms the analytical act of stripping back into an emotional one — a way of listening before we begin to draw.
At MAAPS, this translates into a hybrid practice: architecture and interior design conceived as one continuous activity. We do not separate structure from inhabitation, or material from mood. This interventional, adaptive approach allows each project to evolve naturally from its own anatomy — the interior as an extension of the building’s logic, the building as an instrument of atmosphere and belonging.
In every project, stripping back becomes a moment of calibration. We work through material and memory to locate the true condition of a space — to understand not only what it looks like, but why it feels the way it does. Cracks, shadows, joinery, proportions — all are clues. Each uncovering becomes a dialogue between past intention and future potential. It’s within this dialogue that invention takes root.
Discovery isn’t the end of stripping back; it’s the beginning. Once we understand how a space holds energy — how light travels through it, how sound gathers, how people once moved — we can recompose those forces in a new way.
Across cultures, this intuition has long been recognised. Traditions such as Vastu Śāstra in India explored the same principle — that architecture is a living system of balance and orientation, aligning human activity with the quiet energies of place. Stripping back, in our time, is another form of that calibration: a way of restoring harmony before we begin again.
The stripped-back state becomes a springboard for invention, a precise moment when truth and imagination align.
To strip back, then, is to act with both respect and optimism. It’s a practice that acknowledges the continuum of architecture — the flow of energy through time — while setting the stage for its renewal.
Stripping back, to go forward – A design philosophy, a process of discovery, and a quiet tribute to the teachers — and buildings — that taught us how to see.
Further Reading:
- Mercuriosity — Gordon Matta-Clark: Anarchitect
- Fred Scott, On Altering Architecture (Routledge, 2008)
