Open City, Open House, Open Heart (Mix Interiors)

Manijeh Verghese on rethinking systems, who gets to make decisions about public spaces and why she’s no longer using the word ‘architecture.’

I arrive early to meet the CEO of Open City, Manijeh Verghese, and the sun is shining, so I take my time walking from North Greenwich tube station to what she described in her directions as ‘the building with the basketball court on the roof.’ Once a remote post-industrial wasteland, this area was dubbed London’s ‘Design District’ when it opened in 2021. A car-free zone, it feels calmer than much of the capital, and yet the early morning light and excited groups of school children overtaking me as they move between its not-yet-open venues add a sense of anticipation. Of its 16 distinctive buildings, I am looking for a concrete construction with external corridors and stairways. The mesh that keeps the basketballs on the roof extends all the way down the building, in place of glass or balustrades, giving it a vertiginous quality as I climb to the first floor. Still early, I beat Verghese there, but she arrives right on time, and we head back out to sit outside a nearby café.If I was expecting to be intimidated by this accomplished woman who has explored architecture and place-making from every angle, she quickly puts me at ease by laughing at my first question about her early life. ‘Wow, this is going to be an extensive piece, huh?’ she says with a twinkle in her eye, pausing for a no more than a beat before diving right in. ‘I was born in London to Indian parents but moved to Bangalore with my Mum when I was five,’ she starts. ‘I grew up there, spending summers in London with my Dad.’ Brought up in a tight-knit multi-generational community, she saw first-hand how the IT boom turned the ‘garden city of India’ into a ‘building site,’ but she always felt at home behind her mother’s bright pink front door. ‘It was incredible in hindsight because so much of that shaped who I am today.’She got a scholarship to study maths at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, America, where a throwaway comment changed her entire trajectory. She was volunteering, reading to children with learning difficulties, when the third-year architecture student tasked with driving volunteers to and from school started talking about a study abroad program. ‘Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that architecture could be my career,’ Verghese explains. ‘She convinced me I could do it and changed my life. I declared architecture as my major and even signed up for the exact same study abroad programme in New York and Paris. She set me on a path I never expected.’ Verghese often talks about such pivotal moments in her life as if they were unearned, but it strikes me that it takes a certain sort of student to have found herself in that car in the first place.After working for John Pawson and Foster + Partners, she completed her studies at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture, and this time it was a lecture from Indy Johar—the architect behind the ‘building with the basketball court on the roof’ we are now sitting opposite—that proved pivotal. He had been commissioned to design a new school lunchroom because an expanding student body had outgrown the existing space. After research and analysis, he recommended a new bell system instead—one that would enable staggered lunch breaks, relieving pressure on the canteen without the need for more space. ‘I remember feeling like my brain was exploding as I realised; “Oh my God, this is architecture!”’ she says. ‘Architecture is about rethinking systems by understanding who there are for and how people use them. That’s how you influence systemic change.’From here on in, her career reads like a considered endeavour to explore this idea from every angle. She has written for Icon and Disegno magazines, taught at the AA and Oxford Brookes University, and co-curated both ‘The Garden of Privatised Delights’—the British Pavilion for the 2021 Venice Biennale—and the South Asia Gallery for Manchester Museum, in partnership with the British Museum. She has also served as a Mayor of London Design Advocate and an advisory board member for the DisOrdinary Architecture Project—helping to rethink how disability can transform design in the built environment. But with a humility that I am quickly learning is characteristic of Verghese, she deflects the suggestion. ‘I’ve never thought about it like that,’ she says. ‘There were honestly times when I wondered where my career was going, because I couldn’t see a straight line, but now I tell students that the best careers are a mix of the opportunities you seek out and those that you have to leave room for, because they come at you out of the blue.’One such opportunity was the role she spent a decade in before joining Open City—as Head of Public Engagement at the AA, for whom she developed a public programme to collectively question how to design a more inclusive society. ‘I never expected that opportunity; it was a dream job,’ she says. ‘To have complete freedom to organise a programme of events that enabled people who couldn't afford to study at the AA to come in and experience architecture was incredible.’ There might not be a straight line running through Verghese’s career, but there is a ‘red thread’—a guiding principle that makes sense of all her choices, sought out or otherwise. ‘I've always been interested in who architecture is for, who has a right to the city and who gets to make decisions about public spaces,’ she says. ‘Throughout all the things I've done, what stitches them together is working with people to enable their voices to shape the city.’One way she is doing that at Open City is by dropping the word ‘architecture’ altogether. ‘The minute you swap that word out, it fundamentally transforms who gets to play a role in shaping the city and determining what it can be,’ she says. ‘It is a very inaccessible word. What's amazing about Open City is that, because we talk about cities and not architecture, it breaks down some of the barriers that limit people from being part of that conversation.’ She believes that people underestimate the charity’s flagship Open House Festival, which offers unprecedented public access to London’s buildings every September. ‘A festival or a tour can seem like a nice-to-have, but a festival is an amazing way to test ideas out,’ she argues. ‘How do we take something temporary and open it up? How does that experiment become permanent? How does that help us create better and more resilient cities?’As well as the festival, Open City offers a year-round programme of events including ‘city-making workshops’ at primary and special needs schools, as well as Accelerate—the award-winning mentoring programme for young people traditionally excluded from architecture—plus events, podcasts, tours and publications that aim to democratise public knowledge about cities. It is part of a network of more than 60 other Open House Festivals around the world. As we finish our coffees, architecture students start milling about us with clipboards and a photographer’s assistant dresses cockerpoos as ghosts. There is a real sense that, in this part of the city, in this moment, the city is for everybody.But in contrast, this year’s Open House Festival started on the same day that more than 110,000 people reportedly took part in violent far-right street protests, which Verghese had to traverse to reach events in the programme. ‘I felt alone and scared on public transport, which I never have in London,’ she says. ‘London is a city with such an amazing mix of cultures that you feel at home no matter where you're from—and to see that being challenged by people coming in from elsewhere was really worrying.’ Thankfully, the contrast on arriving at each destination could not have been more stark. ‘One of the places I visited was Fabian Watkinson’s one-bedroomed flat, which he has been opening up since 2001,’ she says. ‘He thought he'd do it for two years and all these years later, he’s still running multiple tours of his home and the estate every day—and he’s become such an expert on modernist social housing that he's written a book about it. In every space I visited, I was reminded of the amazing community of people and sense of solidarity that things like the Festival draw to the surface.’Reflecting on her first year in the job and the first Open House Festival under her stewardship, she is characteristically keen to tell me how much she has learnt and give credit to her team, but when pressed, she shares bold plans. ‘How do we create cities that are collectively shaped at a time when we're questioning democracy and whether our voice even matters?’ she asks. ‘What I find really inspiring about Open City is the very real sense that cities are powered by people. We need to find new channels to express ourselves, to shape the projects that happen, to think about future resilience when it comes to the climate crisis and equitable societies. That's our next challenge.’ It’s a mammoth challenge, perhaps insurmountable, but if anybody is up to the task, it’s Manijeh Verghese.

Katie Treggiden is a craft, design and sustainability writer, a nature facilitator and the author of Broken: Mending and Repair in a Throwaway World (Ludion, 2023).