Sarah Rivière architect, RIBA UK, BDA Berlin.

Design innovation & creative spatial practice.

Sarah Rivière is a German / British architect, teacher and architectural researcher. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Falmouth University in Cornwall. She has been designing, researching, teaching, and publishing on the architecture of residential and social space for over 25 years. She practices in a process-based way to develop and perform nuanced design through which more vibrant, cooperative, and inclusive dwelling spaces are created.

Sarah Rivière is a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA UK) and the BDA-Berlin, and is registered as an architect at both the Architects Registration Board (ARB UK) and the Berliner Architektenkammer (AK-Berlin, DE). Her office aims to combine socially responsible architecture with ecological generosity, and works closely with clients, consultants, local authorities, and construction firms to create individual buildings specifically designed for the needs and wishes of local people, the wider environment, and for flexible long-term future use. See recent built work here...

Following a first degree in Physics, Sarah studied architecture at the University of Westminster and at the Bartlett in London. She has worked in a number of internationally respected architectural firms in Germany, England and the USA, and has taught at the Technical University and the Free University in Berlin, alongside running her Berlin office. See the Survival Lounge Project at the TU Berlin here...

Together with the Hamburg architect and academic, Wiltrud Simbürger, Rivière co-initiated the Dream – Play – Challenge Project in 2021.  Together, Simbürger and Rivière co-hosted the 2024 Dream Play Challenge: Sustainability in Architecture Workshop on Earthday 2024 at the Nordic Embassies in Berlin. Previously they ran the Dream Play Challenge: the Future of Residential Living symposium at the Nordic Embassies in Berlin as part of the WIA-Berlin Festival, and co-published the first Dream – Play – Challenge book in January 2023: "The Dream – Play – Challenge Project. Facing up to the Crisis in Residential Living," Wiltrud Simbürger and Sarah Riviere [Eds.], 2023. More information here...

Rivière is known for deriving the concept of mild stasiology in her 2017 text "Stasis, Charging the Space of Change" in TU Delft’s Footprint Journal special issue on “Spaces of Conflict” edited by Marc Schoonderbeek and Malkit Shoshan. Here, she proposed mild stasis as a vibrant yet located state of kindred engagement that gives equitable voice to all protagonists, and makes violence inconceivable. Rivière's work presents mild stasis as “an enabler, but one that also set out precise demands of relationship, moderation, and reconciliation, while holding the promise of new, energetic onward movement for all parties post-stasis” (Rivière, S. (2017). "Stasis, Charging the Space of Change". Footprint, 10(2), 79-94). Full text here...

As part of her ongoing research on the spatial agency of architecture, Rivière creates films on the social and architectural implications of mild stasis: her 2023 stop-motion animation film "Stasis at 835 Kings Road" uses architectural historical narrative to actively counter the failure of the cooperative enterprise at the "Schindler House," 835 Kings Road, West Hollywood in the early 1920s. Parts of this work were shown at the 2nd Biennale for contemporary European artistic research in architecture in 2019, WORDS + WORKS, Copenhagen. See images from the film here....