5th Studio is a unique spatial design agency, working across the fields of architecture, urban design, infrastructure and landscape. We work with our clients and commissioners to create beauty and enduring value from complex situations.
We apply our spatial intelligence to a broad spectrum — from delivering buildings through to research and strategy. We strive to be visionary, innovative and persuasive, and in all our projects we commit to successful outcomes beyond the traditional role of a designer: leading the team, transforming risk into opportunity, raising profile and clearly articulating the objectives of a project.
5th Studio offers bespoke services, tailored to the particular needs of clients and projects — we are a rigorous, can-do organisation ready to take on any challenge.
Architecture
5th Studio create award-winning buildings, ranging from housing through to spaces for universities & the creative economy. We design strikingly beautiful and highly sustainable buildings which relate positively with their surrounding context. Our buildings tend to combine spatial richness with an economy of means, and intelligent use of technical innovation, in order to deliver value for money. We like to work from the earliest opportunity right through to post-occupancy, and enjoy the process of building.
Urban Design & Masterplanning
5th Studio are working in some of the most challenging regeneration and masterplanning locations in the UK, from Europe’s largest industrial estate, the huge regeneration area of Old Oak and Park Royal, through the Olympic Park and Lea Valley, to the future shape of Cambridge.
Concept Design
5th Studio are spatially entrepreneurial - some of our most creative work has involved identifying and proposing projects, establishing what could happen in a particular place. We like to work with clients from the very beginning; helping to establish a brief - and providing the project narrative, information for financial appraisals, and other pragmatic material.
Planning
We work extensively with planning authorities to build robust place-making and design quality into their planning strategy. Members of the practice are involved with design quality and advisory roles for long term projects like High Speed Two, through to quality panels in Oxford, Cambridge and the London Olympic Park. We regularly help prepare supplementary planning documents, opportunity area frameworks, and other formal documents, as well as working with planning teams to give informal advice, and masterplanning to inform decision making.
Sustainability
We are committed to the politics & technics of sustainable design - and are determined that environmental sustainability should be fully integrated within all our projects, but not necessarily as the dominant agenda. We engage with environmental sustainability from the beginning of a project, an approach based on belief in the value of innovative and strategic - rather than bolt-on - technological measures. We prefer to find quiet but effective design strategies.
Advocacy
We strive to be visionary, innovative and persuasive, and in all our projects we commit to a successful outcome beyond the role of designer: leading the design team, raising profile, and clearly articulating the objectives of the project. We are effective at consultation, and in establishing aligned support and ownership for a project from complex client and stakeholder groups.