Architecture is, at its core, a collaborative practice. At Hawkins\Brown, the spirit of collaboration sits at the heart of everything we do. External voices can elevate a project in unexpected and meaningful ways, and nowhere is that more evident than in our work with artists.

Collaborating with artists pushes us to think differently. It invites us to question our assumptions, expand our perspective, and explore new ways of making. The most successful partnerships begin early, at the conceptual stage, and result in projects with greater emotional resonance and deeper social impact.

Over our decade in Manchester, Hawkins\Brown has built a strong relationship with Manchester International Festival and Factory International. In 2017 we installed a gigantic yellow catwalk in Piccadilly Gardens for Jeremy Deller’s What Is the City but the People? We built a chamber from forgotten items for Ibrahim Mahama’s 2019 Parliament of Ghosts at the Whitworth, and we have designed several iterations of Festival Square, the physical heart of MIF, both through the pandemic and for Aviva Studios.

In 2026 came Ai Weiwei, as both artist and activist. Weiwei’s work is political, provocative and often threaded with an unconventional humour: this is where our worlds collide. Serious about society but profoundly human in our responses.

For almost a year, we worked closely together to develop a durational performance, Sewing a Button, where Weiwei occupied a prison cell in Aviva Studio’s monumental Hall for 24 hours at the launch of his exhibition Button Up! Months of collaboration played out over a single day and night.

At our first meeting, Weiwei quickly identified us as the architects in the room. His practice has overlapped with architecture throughout his career, and he understood how we work. We of course brought ideas, but this was a listening session. He drew in our sketchbooks, we exchanged gifts of books, he shared photos of his beautiful home, an essay in exquisite Chinese timber craftsmanship and detail in a rolling Portuguese landscape, we learnt of his family and his depth of feelings for them, and we ate lunch together. Active listening is so important at the start of any collaboration, and particularly in this piece, where Weiwei would be representing a highly traumatic lived experience: his secret detention by Chinese authorities.

In the months that followed, we shared sketches, made models, visualised the space, tested materials, researched furniture, interrogated details, produced drawings and exchanged references back and forth with Weiwei and his studio.

The set itself was a spatial recreation of the cell that Ai Weiwei occupied for 81 days back in 2011. It was not intended as a forensic replica, but instead to convey the atmosphere for the performance – one that allowed movement, costume and dialogue to come to the fore. Simultaneously an intimate, in-person experience and a global online broadcast, the piece was an exercise in verisimilitude and artifice, surveillance and control.

Leading up to the performance, we continued to meet with Weiwei, both in London and Cambridge. We would have long conversations about key details like the size and pattern of the floor tiles, seared into Weiwei’s memory from hours spent pacing back and forth across the cell – this repetitive pacing becoming the foundation for the movement of the performance. He would share his plans for costumes, referencing both the chaotic political climate and his own love of cats. We would also talk about other projects, trips to the Lake District and Weiwei’s early career in New York. Many of these conversations translate into subtle references in the design of the set.

As the show drew nearer, we switched gear to the physical build, working closely with local set-builder Splinter Scenery. The team brought innovative thinking to the build and rebuilding of the set whilst working with us to preserve and celebrate important details.

Developing the set for Sewing a Button gave us the chance to work with a new group of collaborators: scriptwriters, costume designers, producers, sound and lighting designers. Each discipline brings its own perspective, shaping the design, honing the experience and enlightening lessons learnt for future projects.

As we watched the performance unfold, both in the Hall and online over the 24 hours, the themes rose to the fore: mundanity and control, but also humanity and resilience. The interrogations offered deeper insight, this time conducted by poets and broadcasters.

At the end of the performance, Weiwei left the stage masked in a black bag. The front wall of the set was closed, and the lights dimmed. For us, the sharp contrast of building projects, designed and built to last, compared with the ephemeral nature of an art installation such as this is significant. Good, therefore, to know that the set and its constituent parts, after disassembly, have already been distributed for re-use. And regardless of the short timeframes and temporary nature of the art, the personal investment, impact and outcomes are no less powerful.