Artist / Curator / Architect
Ken graduated from the Mackintosh School of Architecture in Glasgow after gaining his undergraduate degree at the Polytechnic of Central London. He worked as a freelance architect in Scotland and London, including Rock Townsend / Ralph Erskine on the “Ark” Office Building in Hammersmith, London, and for London Underground, as a site architect on the Will Alsop designed North Greenwich Station.
In 1998 he bought the ex milk depot at 2c Kings Grove Peckham with sculptor and film maker Julia Manheim. They have since turned this into a live /work studio and home adding three flats to the front of the building. At the beginning of the new millennium Quay 2c was formed as a vehicle for multi disciplinary projects. The practice completed a varying portfolio of projects including a number of housing and mixed use buildings, and became pioneers of the use of solid laminated timber (CLT) structures with the Fairmule House and Chancery Court projects seen below. The Laundry Houses in Peckham, a self developed project of two new 4 bed houses also uses CLT. http://laundryhouses.blogspot.com
Ken taught and lectured extensively in the USA, India, Europe and had a part time lectureship at the Oxford School of Architecture for many years. He also lectured and ran design studios in many other contexts and Universities, was trustee and chair of Artpoint Trust, a Public Arts Commissioning Agency in Oxford and is co-curator and founder of m2 gallery on the front of Quay House in Peckham. He served on LB of Newham’s & extensively on LB Southwark’s Design Review Panels.
From 2016 Ken has been working with Artists Studio Company as a consultant, curating with Julia Manheim and Sarah Goodwin the m2(at)15 anniversary show at APT Gallery in 2018 while developing the 4 x m2 Gallery Pavilion project. He continues to make photographs which have been published as postcard albums yearly since 2014. They can be seen on the links here:
Liminal Landscapes; Plant Free, 2021; Liminal Landscapes; Plant Infused, 2021; Car Quarantine?, 2020; The Outside Coming In, 2020;The Place of Numbers, 2019; How Do You Do’s, 2018; Between Black And White, 2017 (Roll down this page !) Reflections, 2016; Wrap Duets, 2015; Veils and Repetitions, 2014
Past & Future Projects
19th June - 25th July 2021
2019 Royal Academy Summer Show & Creekside Open
2019 Album Cover
2019 Baby Beach Hut at Quay House
As an adjunct to the m2 gallery and 4 x m2 Gallery Pavilion of Quay House is what we call the Baby Beach Hut. This was designed in 2019 by Ken as a place for artists to use as an affordable place for creative endeavour. It is modelled on the idea of the shed as a retreat in the garden, but with wi-fi and electrics. Supplementary facilities are shared with the other artist residents of Quay House who occupy the main building. Tucked under a Leyland Cypress tree it has an area of 7m2 an insulated timber framed building, clad in western red cedar boards externally and birch ply internally, creating a light filled oasis.
All photographs Anthony Coleman
2018 Quay2c Architects
Fairmule House Project in book on Cross Laminate Timber Projects in the UK.
Between Black & White
September 2017 - January 2018 at Petitou Cafe, Peckham.
This wallet of postcards is a fourth collection of photographs, marking what is becoming a yearly ritual. As a counterpoint to the colour of the “Twin Trilogy” series 2014-2016 and the devisive fall out from the binary choice presented by the EU referendum of 2016, it seemed interesting to investigate colour photos that were ostensibly black and white. In making a preliminary selection and listening to the great bass clarinetist & saxophonist Bennie Maupin’s Penumbra* Cd of 2006, the beauty “between” black and white became the theme and title for the show.
The pictures chosen meditate on a weathered urban world, devoid of direct corporate control, hovering between the recognisable, and something more illusive in their layered complexity. While this, coupled with the black and whiteness can be seen as a lament for a lost communication, the language of photographs is inevitably “light”, the perennial mediator that brings growth, conversations and hope into being. This brought to mind Octavio Paz’s poem “The Bridge”. Here the collaborative complexity to build bridges is used metaphorically to reflect back on making connections, rather than walls of separation. Hopefully the postcards will be sent into the world with affection and some quiet rainbows may appear.
*(Oxford Dictionary definition; Penumbra) 1. The partially shaded outer region of the shadow cast by an opaque object. 2. A peripheral or indeterminate area or group.
Ken Taylor is 5 minutes younger than his twin sister. He is an Architect who takes a lot of photographs and lives in Peckham.
This publication is dedicated to Rosemary Connor Taylor (1933-2016) who had an eye for colour and the nuances Between Black and White.
2015 Light Prototypes
Quay 2c Past Projects
(All Photos By Anthony Coleman)