What’s your biggest challenge with selecting consultants?
🔴Before you consult a specialist large practice or a PM, perhaps you should consider the innovation and agility that smaller practices can bring to the table. I know clients want specialists but also look at the other qualities your consultants may have before you make a final decision.
If you are an investor, building owner or developer, you need design expertise, subject matter expertise, agility and problem solvers.
You might also want to work with a firm that is aiming to solve some of the big issues facing humanity including lack of quality education for many in the developing world, lack of housing and the loss of biodiversity.
🟠We often commence work on the fringes working for developers or contractors and then move into the beating heart of the project through our ability to problem solve at speed and our willingness to never stop learning.
🟢We build teams to solve large complex problems.
👉On your project you will need someone you who can operate in many different roles including trouble-shooter, design co-ordinator, design advocate and change maker. Combinations of these roles come into play at different stages of the project to help the project run smoothly.
👉A change maker is required at the beginning of the project to understand you, your business, the trends tyhat impact your business and if a building will help you to navigate the challenges you are facing. We have done this with Leiths School of Food and Wine for example.
👉A trouble-shooter comes into a project and solves problems for the builder or developer. For example filling gaps left by the original architect to help prevent abortive work on site which slows the project down and costs money to rectify. We did this for Galliford Try on St Andrews Park.
👉Working as an executive architect has helped us shift sector. We were emloyed to complete the technical design on Reading West Station. This required extensive reworking of the design so the station fitted the site and complied with fire regulations.
👉Post 2008 we had to pivot and work on mega projects in the Middle East such as MIST university at MASDAR city. This helped us shift scale. These projects result in upskilling of the team and cross fertilisation of ideas across sectors. It has also exposed us to:
✅New technology including mass timber, glass, fabric, precast concrete.
✅Different ways of making, thinking, selling and working.
✅Exposure to the management of mega scale projects as well as smaller scale work.
Our team has also worked on the Prada store in New York and San Francesco for OMA and for Sergio Rossi here in London. We combine design expertise with technical ability.
The image below is the BMW pavilio from London 2012. We worked with Nussli to act as consultants on this project briding the gap between the client and their designers in Germany and the subcontractors on the ground in the UK tasked with constructing the vision. We acted as interpreters and design co-odinators.
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If you would like to know more, check out my book, availbale on Amazon or download a pdf from my website.
This blog formed the basis of a lecture Graham gave at Reading University.
