Dirty Old River – Sarah Handelman

For nearly twenty-five years Tom Emerson and Stephanie Macdonald, founding directors of 6a architects, have taken an almost literary approach to their work, designing buildings that are shaped by history, style and narrative. It is no wonder that alongside the making of architecture, Tom Emerson has maintained a writing practice that functions in very much the same way.

Dirty Old River brings together essays written by Emerson over three decades. While its focus is on architecture and architects, that point of view is set slightly off-centre, inviting an oblique understanding of architecture and its adjacencies, literary or otherwise, and drawing on a vast array of references, from Joan Didion and Georges Perec to The Kinks and the picturesque. As he writes in the introduction, ‘I have found sideways glances, passing through another discipline or letting myself be guided by what is at hand, more fruitful and enjoyable than tackling the architecture head-on knowing I can’t escape my profession.’ And yet always that dérive leads back to enduring and career-spanning questions: how and why things are made, and what that reveals about being human. The physical form and graphic design of the book, realised by John Morgan studio, is a reflection of the textures that underpin these questions: the rough and the smooth, the clear-cut and muddied, the rarified and the quotidian.

I worked with Tom to develop a structure for this collection, considering numerous pieces until we landed on a group of texts that felt representative of his long-held interests and resonated with one another. Once a table of contents had settled in our minds, I edited the individual texts, in some instances bringing older pieces up to date.

Published by Park Books, 2025