Tim Bowder-Ridger, principal at Conran & Partners, views the Building Safety Act as a welcome invitation for architects to take a holistic approach to architecture and interior design.
Centre Point Tower in Tottenham Court Road, London – originally designed by Richard Seifert and completed in 1966, was converted from a disused office to residential apartments in 2018 by Conran & Partners. Conran and Partners had control over every aspect of the project to ensure the apartments reflected the spirit of the architectural vision.Â
Our founder, Sir Terence Conran, emphasised the importance of the human experience before all else. As a result, Conran and Partners has always viewed the professional divide between architects and interior designers as beside the point. Our primary focus has been on creating spaces and environments for people, whether inside or out, with equal rigour and consideration.
This approach had led to us routinely resourcing projects with a mix of architects and interior designers. While smaller practices have traditionally done this out of necessity, we apply it to larger projects, using varied skills to complete designs from macro to micro scale.
A pool inside Centre Point affords swimmers views over the city.Â
We have undertaken this full scope on selected projects for years, particularly in the UK on adaptive reuse briefs. At Centre Point Tower, for example, we were engaged as architects, with a scope that extended to the interior design and styling, through all stages of work. This was all with a view to ensuring that apartments and amenity spaces seamlessly reflected the spirit of the architecture, which we worked hard to restore and authentically update.
Of course, we will enthusiastically continue to collaborate with our professional colleagues as either architects or interior designers. But we are increasingly being approached to design the insides of buildings as ‘Interior Architects’ as opposed to ‘Interior Designers’, on the same terms as when we are employed as the ‘Architects’ more generally. These architectural appointments are simply extended to include the tasks we would have traditionally undertaken as interior designers, but to an enhanced level of responsibility for the technical coordination within the wider works.
Clients are starting to see that having a single consultant in charge of a holistic conceptual approach delivers cost efficiencies and removes potential gaps or duplications between different scopes of work. It also meets the spirit of the Building Safety Act by allowing the consultant responsible for undertaking and coordinating design work to take on the Building Regulation Principal Designer (BRPD) role.
A Centre Point apartment.Â
This approach requires a broader skill set within practices, and a shift from the culture of practices focusing only on parts of the process of delivering buildings and spaces. And it requires clients to recognise practices’ wide-ranging capabilities, and to fight the habit of placing them in a box. But the results have to be worth it. It’s an opportunity for architects to consider and develop the design from very first principles to the finest details; to create an all-embracing user experience, while being less exposed to the pitfalls of passing packages over to a third party. In short, we have an opportunity to reclaim a level of control that architects traditionally enjoyed.
