At Home in the City

Alan’s book At Home in the City – Domestic Architecture for Challenging Urban Sites is published by RIBA Publishing. The book, which includes two homes Alan designed for himself and his family, examines how architects can overcome the restrictions and challenges of overlooked city sites to create dwellings of imaginative power. Featuring historic and contemporary buildings from all over the world, the projects are themed according to the characteristics of each site, including thresholds and privacy, pushing boundaries, finding nature and retrofitting. The book is both a guide to working with difficult sites as well as a masterclass in how a deep understanding of site and place leads to special, poetic outcomes – and, critically, more much-needed houses.

In a review of the book, Building Design said: “This book reframes the housing crisis not simply as a matter of numbers but as a question of how and where we build within already dense urban environments.”

14 August 2026