blue sky thinking

the architect

Je Ahn is the director at Studio Weave, an award-winning RIBA Chartered Architecture Practice, which places value on happiness, community and the individual. He lives in east London.

As a design studio, we start with a central concept: happiness. It sounds simple, but it’s a complex topic and it’s our job to try to design the right conditions for people to feel happy. It’s a good starting point for anyone thinking about how they want to shape their own futures. The main thing we need to do to make our lives better is to integrate more into our community. In the last 50 years, that way of living has reduced so we’re often very solitary. I come from a large, messy family and it was a lot of fun and drama – I’d love to see more multi-generational living, as it used to be. But for that to happen, there needs to be housing designed and built to accommodate that change because at the moment the housing market is monotonous and limited. For that, we need public bodies to step