Interrobang is a transdisciplinary architecture and engineering practice founded in 2015 within Webb Yates Engineers.
Interrobang is led by Maria Smith, formerly a founding director of multi-award-winning art and architecture practice Studio Weave, and Steve Webb and Andy Yates of Webb Yates Engineers. With Studio Weave, Maria created a diverse body of work including the AR International Emerging Architecture Award-winning Lullaby Factory for Great Ormond Street Hospital; the Civic Trust Special Award-winning Longest Bench; and the RIBA South East Building of the Year 2013, the Ecology of Colour. Webb Yates Engineers was established in 2005 with the aim of creating a practice that combined bright thinking with technical rigour to realise artful and inventive structural designs. After eleven years, the company has won a raft of competitions and awards.
At Interrobang we believe that a person’s discipline defines the expertise they bring to a project, not the restrictive zone within which they can operate. Red-lined remits stifle good ideas, not only through ingrained ideas of role, but because conversations are held in parallel. Beyond multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary working is to overcome the pernicious boundaries of language and culture.
Much of contemporary practice involves battling extensive, often conflicting constraints. To create meaningful intervention in our built environment therefore requires a collaborative and, critically, adventurous attitude to problem solving. Too often architects are divested of any power to innovate in the face of impenetrable engineering imperatives, and somehow at the same time, engineers are relegated to ‘making it work’. This debilitates architects, undervalues the innovation clever engineering can bring to a project, and squanders a host of potential designs. Interrobang rejects this bunk by colluding with and engaging engineers’ visionary, divergent thinking in every project from start to finish.