Smash hit

Anna Liu and Mike Tonkin met in Hong Kong in 1994, but settled in the UK, gaining plaudits for their serene House 1a, London, and Hugo House, Hong Kong. They’re currently working in the public domain, after winning the Architecture Foundation’s Any Old Street? competition last year, to improve the London Old Street area.

What they do “We like to look at and question things in the most brutally direct way — the primal approach,” says Liu. “We psychoanalyse the client, strip a brief down to a desire, or uncover a personality from the site.

“The key is to straddle complexity and simplicity at the same time. A tree, for instance, is a very simple idea, yet its physical form is infinitely variable. With digital tools we can now create the same vast multitude of variables as nature. But we must be as lateral and clear thinking as nature, too”.

Our verdict The things they can do with light and stillness beggars belief.

AOC

Geoff Shearcroft and Tom Coward, friends from Nottingham University, met Vincent Lacovara, a Cambridge graduate, at the Royal College of Art; Shearcroft met Daisy Froud, a languages graduate doing an MA in cultural memory, “on a staircase in Clerkenwell, and introduced her to the RCA bar”, where they began “interesting conversations”, ones they hope to continue in their practice.

AOC was shortlisted last year in the competition to design a new HQ for the Architecture Foundation, and has just completed its first project, a whimsical garden pavilion for the film director Stephen Daldry.

What they do “Architecture that asks interesting questions”, but which “doesn’t drown in its own soup of ideas”. Froud, the non-architect, keeps them on track towards work that’s “open, honest and generous”, involving getting meaningful public participation in the design and the end building, too. “Architects need to get better at listening to other people.”

Our verdict They combine the questioning naivety of youth with a serious agenda. I don’t think they know where they’re going exactly, and that’s just how they like it.

SURFACE

Richard Scott and Andy Macfee met at the Bartlett School of Architecture before working for Will Alsop, where Macfee was project architect on the Stirling Prize-winning Peckham Library. Surface has just completed two small but bold projects for Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, a disabled lift and loo in the medical library and a graduate centre for humanities. They are currently working on a Centre for Film & Media Studies for Birkbeck College, London.

What they do “Architecture of rich multisensory experience,” says Macfee. “We like to work with abstract metaphorical ideas to conceptualise each project in a distinctive way. Examples are our ideas of ecstatic surfaces, streams of consciousness, erotic draping, cones of projection and tumbling blocks.”

Our verdict Sometimes I’ve no idea what they’re saying, but their architecture speaks for itself. Bold, gutsy yet subtle even on the smallest of scale.

DSDHA

Deborah Saunt studied at Edinburgh and Cambridge, and worked with Tony Fretton; David Hills joined the Dutch practice Erick van Egeraat after Cambridge. The pair set up DSDHA in 1998. Claire McDonald joined in 2001. Their aim? “To design public buildings.” Their first project, though, was a crystalline house extension, which won a RIBA award. But they soon began a string of public commissions, such as a new urban landscape in Castleford for Channel 4’s regeneration project. Education is a speciality: nurseries and early years centres in Bury and Dagenham, and now schools across the country including a £27 million campus in Guildford.

What they do “We produce architecture with an urban scale,” says Hills, “which spans between the macro and the micro, which is interested as much in social innovation as technical innovation and which seeks to redefine parts of the city.”

Our verdict One of the few British practices with an overt political and social agenda. Their work doesn’t harangue, but is subtle, warm and clever.

• 40 under 40, the V&A (0870 9063883), to Aug 29