Time to Focus on the Future…

It’s time to focus on the future. Throughout history, technological and social changes seem to ebb and flow at different paces of acceleration. With a new government in the offing and an AI revolution already unleashed, we are undoubtedly in one such historic period of accelerated change.

The potential impact of this on the practice and its culture was the focus of discussion throughout our team away day.

Focusing on The Present…

Practice day working group discussions were chaired by the brilliant Neil Gibson and led by Managing Director Mark Slater. We were also delighted to welcome Mark Baker who is the co-founder of Claremont Consulting. Through Mark’s leadership, his team and business have won awards including No. 1 Best Small London-based Company to Work For, and No.2 Best Company to Work for Nationally. Mark shared his knowledge and expertise in workplace culture and work-life balance amongst many other helpful insights that will help us as our team continues to grow.

Three of the themes we focussed on included:

How to be more sustainable as a business, led by Matt Hinkins
How to communicate better, led by Charlie Kirby
How to improve our approach to biodiversity, led by Steve Pickles

After unpacking lots of lofty ideas around using AI and other innovative changes to the practice in the future, we reflected on which of these ideas could be implemented in the present. Updating our team values and implementing new methods of inter-team communication have already been rolled out and we look forward to testing AI on live projects soon.

Below are some inspirational buildings that we saw on our sightseeing tour.

Regent's Canal Tow Path

Grand Union Walk Housing

SCL International College building from a street view

Haverstock School building on Haverstock Hill in Camden

Looking to The Future…

In the long history of our 137+ year business, our team has been able to read the changing winds and chart a course to success. In that period of time, the world has navigated wars, recessions, and significant leaps in technology. The way we design and construct buildings today is vastly more advanced thanks to the continuous march of tech innovation. Alongside this growth in technical capacity to deliver buildings, the town planning system and the labour/skills market have evolved to be a bottleneck in the UK housebuilding machine.

At the consultancy end of the process, architects and designers are already experimenting with tools to speed up front-end design. The question is this: can similar AI-powered innovation in the town planning system and construction sector serve to widen the bottleneck to get this country building again? As a business, we are of course primarily focused on innovation within our own sphere of influence. AI tools can help us ideate, iterate, represent, and test concepts quickly, which we think could lead to much more critical debate about design quality. However, we are keenly watching for opportunities and signs of acceleration in the planning and construction part of the development workflow. Such change could come through technology and/or through changing legislation—both of which are entwined.

Many thanks to Stanislav Brezden for taking the team through some live demos of different AI tools, including a floor-plan generator and image/rendering tools. We look forward to updating our clients soon with more news on how we are integrating new methods of working. We ended the day feeling recharged and focused on the future!