Dialogues 28 – Tonkin Liu
July 2025
On Wednesday 23rd July, Henley Halebrown will host Dialogues 28 with Anna Liu and Mike Tonkin on their new book ‘Asking Looking Playing Making: a nature-focused design process' (RIBA Publishing, April 2025).
Design is a process requiring freedom and rigour, expansion and focus, lateral and linear thinking. How can this process transform places through place-specific, meaningful visions?
Stories shape visions, touch hearts and minds, and unify communities. In our times, nature-based stories can envision and deliver the positive, much-needed social, economic, and environmental change.
Anna Liu and Mike Tonkin, architects and co-founders of Tonkin Liu Architects, will discuss four nature-led, story-led design stages: Asking Looking Playing Making. The four stages use storytelling tools: riddle, quest, archetype, script and entity, to question, amplify, abstract, and distil a story from each project’s unique circumstances.
The process begins by expanding a project’s brief through the particularities of nature, people, and place, and through the time perspectives of past, present, future. As threads of the project’s story emerge, they evolve through subsequent form-making and construction stages, connecting place-making to technical innovation.
Tonkin Liu studio bridges teaching, research, and practice, with “Asking Looking Playing Making” as the placemaking design approach that delivers award-winning projects spanning architecture, landscape architecture, medical device, structural technique, and sculpture.
The talk will also be live streamed on Henley Halebrown's YouTube channel.