Sophie Hughes

About

Sophie is an architectural designer with a background in architecture from Central Saint Martins. Her practice explores slow design as a quiet resistance to speed, overconsumption, and industrial urgency, seeking instead to work with the rhythms of the environment. Through her work, she creates architectures that are not just responsive to natural forces but shaped by them, weaving narratives of seasonality, patience, and environmental exchange.

During her studies at the RCA, Sophie has explored how design can facilitate dialogue between communities and landscapes. Her first project envisioned a mobile market that brought together the Greek and Turkish Cypriot communities on either side of the buffer zone in Cyprus. Inspired by historic trade carts once used across the island, the proposal imagined a shared marketplace as a moving architecture of reconciliation—an open platform for connection and exchange across political divides.

Her final project, Windbound Rituals, is set on the windswept limestone ridge of Brean Down in Somerset. Rising 90 metres above sea level, this landscape—shaped by constant south-westerly winds and sculpted hawthorn trees—became the co-author of her design. The project introduces a series of wind-powered machines that produce hawthorn wine, tea, and jam, yet they only work when the wind allows. These machines are both spatial and functional, leaning into the same forces that shape the land, and turning acts of making into rituals governed by weather, patience, and seasonality.

Through Windbound Rituals, Sophie asks: What happens when making is left to the wind? In a culture driven by speed, control, and surplus, the project offers an alternative pace—one where production is uncertain, small in scale, and deeply rooted in place. By inviting the environment to lead, the work imagines a future of design that values slowness, care, and collaboration with natural forces.