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.
The construction industry accounts for almost 40% of energy-related emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). Carbon emissions produced through these construction activity have a major impact on the climate and on biodiversity. For everyone working in the construction industry, meeting the needs of our society without breaching the earth’s ecological boundaries will demand a paradigm shift in our behaviour. Together with our clients, we will need to commission and design buildings, cities and infrastructures as indivisible components of a larger, constantly regenerating and self-sustaining system.
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.
