Practice & People

We’re a partnership of equals: around half of our people are Partners, but with transparency, collaboration, and democratic decision-making as core principles, all our people can voice their opinions and contribute meaningfully to the running of the business.

We value and celebrate the fact that our people come from a huge variety of backgrounds; we commit whole-heartedly to maintaining this diversity of background and thought. Our practice numbers nearly 300 engineers, designers, consultants, and business administrators across our five offices, and includes engineers, physicists, architects, biologists, zoologists, mathematicians, historians, and many more. We are all united by an ability to think practically and creatively, and a shared sense of responsibility, commitment, and duty towards each other, our practice, and our projects.

Care and responsibility have always been central to our practice: for the planet, our people, and wider society. Long before it was the "standard", we were pioneering low-energy and low-carbon building design, and we remain at the forefront to this day. Below is just a small selection of the milestones along the way...

Max founded the practice from his London home in 1966, moving into a more formal London office a few years later. It wasn't until 2001 that we opened a second space, in Cambridge, then two years later in Edinburgh. In 2012, we expanded with an office in Manchester and added a Bristol base the year after. All five offices are verified as net zero carbon against the UK Green Building Council framework, and have been since 2020, and all are deliberately located close to public transport to encourage sustainable travel.

We publish our thoughts openly and freely, to share our knowledge and help the industry make progress and bring about change.

Awards don't motivate us as much as the kudos we receive from satisfied clients, architects, building managers and building users, but they are always nice to win.

An analysis, published in the Architects' Journal in 2023, showed that no one in the industry had worked on more RIBA Stirling Prize-shortlisted projects in the last five years than us!