AT chats to…Roger Hawkins from Hawkins\Brown about setting up shop in Toronto, sorting out a succession plan and taking 30 years to finish the practice’s first job.

Laboratory space at the Living Systems Institute, Exeter. The building provides a world-class facility with the ethos of inter-disciplinary and collaborative research firmly at its core. 

What brings you to BCO Conference?
I’ve been coming since they held it in Amsterdam, so for the last five years. I always welcome the opportunity to network and meet colleagues. We’ve all got a common purpose, which is how we can work collectively to improve the built environment and frankly, I don’t think that, traditionally, architects have been very good at explaining what we do so we should be taking any opportunity to promote better design.

I cycle here so there’s also the opportunity to network on the way. I used to do the bike ride to MIPIM, which is brilliantly organised by Club Peleton. It’s a real privilege to cycle with interesting people but after doing it five times it gets a bit repetitive. The cycle ride to BCO Conference is a slower pace than the bike ride to MIPIM, which is a little bit too testosterone fuelled. And the fact that the conference is held in a different place each year means that it’s always a different route. I’d encourage anyone who’s got even the vaguest interest in cycling to sign up for the BCO ride.

What are your impressions of Dublin?
We have an office here. We have a few different offices. It started when Katie Tonkinson in our office wanted to move back to her home town of Manchester for family reasons. We said “we don’t want to lose you so why don’t we set up a Manchester office?” Off the back of that we opened an office in Edinbugh, and that gave us the confidence to think about coming to Dublin. Then we came across an interesting job prospect in Europe and the client said  “the only way we can employ you is if you have a base in the EU”, so Dublin made sense.

Did you get the job?
We don’t know yet. It’s an existing building that needs love and care. We know so much about the existing building it would make sense for us to at least have a strategic role. We’ve developed a space optimisation tool that helps us to capture and visualise data and identify opportunities. We’ve worked with quite a few public sector institutions where we can really help with understanding the estate and forming the brief.

To what extent does your digital expertise give you a competitive edge?
Our digital expertise allows us to offer services, especially consultancy work at the early stages of a project, that is an important fee-generating service. One thing we don’t charge for is H\B:ERT. It’s a tool that we’ve developed which is a plug-in to Revit where you can analyse the embodied and whole life carbon of different building components and materials, so we can compare different options throughout the design process. We’ve put that out to the market as a free resource and have been collecting data for years.

How else has the practice evolved over the last few years?
We are now working more for corporate private sector clients. Our practice has grown since the 90s partly by delivering lots of buildings for universities, including research facilities and academic buildings. In the current climate those clients are building less and consolidating more, but we’re finding the skills we’ve developed are transferable into office projects because more and more clients are working to build for life science or lab-enabled space, so we see this as a key market. A lot of corporate clients are really interested in whole-life carbon primarily because they know their tenants will be interested in it. We can be the voice of the tenant because we’ve done lab fitouts for universities.

Are you surprised at the way the practice has developed?
It still feels like a very young practice. I think that’s because we’ve only just finished our first real job, which is Tottenham Court Road station. We set up 1988 and got Tottenham Court Road  in 1992. Me and Russell (Brown) went to the interview and we were up against Will Alsop and BDP, who had brought in Ralph Erskine. I said at the interview “you need to employ a young architect, otherwise they’ll be dead by the time the project’s finished.”

What’s next?
On the back of Tottenham Court Road we’ve been touting around for transport projects abroad. We’re designing three new underground stations for Toronto SSE (Scarborough Subway Extension). Scarborough is to Toronto a bit like Croydon is to London. Toronto is the fastest-growing city in North America and is determined to have coordinated development with proper public transport. They’re really ambitious.

So are you setting up shop in Toronto?
Yup. Two people from the London office are going out there for two years. We’ve always run the office as a series of studios, so we like the idea that people from central office can take our company culture and set up a studio elsewhere. We take our commitment to our staff very seriously. We’re careful about who we employ and we give them opportunities to develop their careers. And we’re an Employee Ownership Trust. That’s our succession plan.

Roger Hawkins is co-founder and director of Hawkins\Brown.