London
Elena Carter
Founding Partner
Trained at the Architectural Association. Leads civic and dwelling work. Writes the studio thermal specifications by hand.
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Practice
We design rooms that tell the truth about weather.
Meridian is a spatial research studio. We work where architecture, landscape, and light collapse into the same problem: how to stay on a warming planet without lying about it. The studio was founded in London in 2014 and now keeps field stations in Edinburgh and Melbourne — not as offices, but as instruments.
38
Built works
3
Field stations
12
Years of practice
56 N
Northernmost site
People
The room
Edinburgh
Sarah Hall
Partner, Edinburgh
Architect and former glacier surveyor. Responsible for coastal work, baths, and anything that has to survive a strong wind.
Melbourne
James Morrow
Partner, Melbourne
Runs the material lab. Trained as a carpenter before architecture. Keeps the moss archive and the cedar store.
London
Martha Vale
Associate, Light
Lighting designer. Argues for darkness in every meeting and usually wins on the second site visit.
London
Daniel Brooks
Associate, Research
Historian of comfort. Builds the studio climate archive and teaches the summer survey course.
Edinburgh
Amy Gardner
Associate, Landscape
Planting and soils. Treats a fifty-year succession plan as a construction drawing.
London
Thomas Reed
Architect
Detail lead on Tide Market Hall. Obsessed with drainage that people can see and clean.
Melbourne
Hannah Foster
Architect
Joinery and paper. Drew every stair of the Quiet Tower at large scale before a single timber was cut.
Measure first
No concept before a week on site. Wind, tide, soil, and the way people already use the place.
Make it maintainable
A detail that cannot be repaired by a local crew is a vanity. We draw the maintenance as carefully as the opening.
Refuse the setpoint
Comfort is seasonal. Buildings that pretend otherwise waste energy and insult the climate they sit in.
Keep a field station
The studio is not a single room in a capital. Research happens where the weather is least polite.
Method
01
Survey
We begin with wind roses, tide tables, soil cores, and a week of walking. Nothing is drawn until the site has been named properly.
02
Brief as climate
Programs are rewritten as thermal, social, and ecological loads. A school is a shade machine. A house is a wind instrument.
03
Prototype
Full-size mock-ups in the Melbourne lab and on-site casts in Scotland. We trust a wall we have already failed once.
04
Assemble
Construction is treated as a second design phase. Details are redrawn weekly with the people who will maintain them.
05
Aftercare
Every project stays on the books for a decade. We return for moss surveys, night audits, and the first real summer.