What is the story of securing your first project?

A laboratory study for English China Clays

“Winning the first few projects is one of the hardest parts of establishing an architectural studio. Getting started is tough.

Andrew and I were given great advice in 1985 by RIBA President Michael Manser and his journalist wife Jose. They encouraged us to always have a 5 year plan and if necessary to invent our own projects to demonstrate our design skills and to have something to show clients. We took their advice and landed our first real commission for English China Clay.

Our entry to the 1985 RIBA 40 under 40 exhibition consisted of our joint work at Leicester Poly, our two flats in Belsize Park (which we wouldn’t be able to afford now) and our competition entries such as Kew Gardens visitors centre. We didn’t have any work and didn’t really know how to get any so Jose suggested we just invent something.

We dreamed up a project for a research laboratory because I had worked on Schlumberger Cambridge with Michael Hopkins and Andrew had been looking over the shoulder of the Inmos team at Richard Rogers. To make it more glamorous we chose a hillside site in Lake Como near Renzo’s B&B Italia. The drawings and model were selected for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and Architecture Aujourd’hui wrote about it and New Scientist asked us to write an article about laboratory layouts and how it could improve interaction and collaboration.

We had always been admirers of Frank Duffy and the work he did with open plan offices and also the research Norman Foster and Michael Hopkins produced for IBM and VW in those wonderful landscape A4 reports. We thought we could do the same for laboratories.

We decided to take an exhibition stand in Manchester for a Laboratory Trade show in the G Mex. We were the only architects there in a sea of sophisticated microscopes, centrifuges and other delicate lab equipment. We felt a bit out of place but a senior scientist from English China Clays in St Austell stopped to speak and commissioned us to undertake a 3 month study for their new labs – analysing adjacencies, groupings, management and social spaces. We evaluated the options for single storey and two storey schemes.

All the work became incorporated later in our competition winning entry for New England Biolabs below but more importantly encouraged us to follow Jose Manser’s advice – to undertake our own research and generate our own projects so that we would always have something to show. Nowadays there are many more outlets to show off ideas but there are many more talented designers doing just that.

New England Biolabs

Northwich Cultural Centre – a new arts centre in the north-west of England

“It was 2009 and the studio was on its knees. We had been working on new Further Education colleges which had all been cancelled on one day – we had lost most of the work in the studio and it was very hard to keep the lights on.

This was an international design competition which we needed to win but we were up against over 100 entries. The stakes were high! We worked through the night to get the final design and model made.

We made it through to the final three and loaded up my car (Saab convertible of course!) and drove from London up to Cheshire for the interview. The project architect’s Mum had made a cover for the model from black and white fabric (this being a pattern prevalent on the buildings in the town). We were very nervous but kept the model covered throughout the interview…..the panel’s curiosity grew and grew.

At the end of the interview we took the cover off to a collective WOW from everyone in the room. We won the competition beating a list of famous architects from around the world.

Sadly the project never happened – but the process we went through has informed many other successful bids since. The model was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 2010. For me this experience was so important for my confidence as a designer and to understand that when you can inspire your team and empower their determination and talent you can achieve anything – the world of architecture is not ‘sewn up’.

So my advice to the next generation is to look for inspiration through narrative but also through unusual sources, to come up with unique architecture, do not follow the crowd, believe in your ability to be different. I want to be shocked. I want to hear that WOW.

Northwich Cultural Centre

A concrete slab for a generator

“The day after we were simultaneously laid off in separate conference rooms during the Great Recession—a brutal day that saw our previous firm shrink from 75 people to 22—we decided to start our own.

Our first project came from a sympathetic general contractor who paid us $1,000 to design a generator slab and fence enclosure for their office. They didn’t even build it according to our designs, but that tiny fee helped to keep the lights on.

Funding our new venture with maxed-out credit cards, 401(k) loans, and back-to-back 30-day free trials of Revit, we hustled through the leanest months of our lives.

That tenacity paid off. From our dining room table, we went on to secure and complete our first major commission, Skype’s North American headquarters, where the contractor actually did build what we designed.

Skype’s North American HQ