CIVIC.
INFRASTRUCTURE.
INDUSTRIAL.
Three portfolios that share crews, a safety regime and a design office, and share almost nothing else about how a week is planned.
CIVIC.
Libraries, schools, sports halls, town offices, swimming pools and the occasional theatre. Buildings paid for once and used by everybody.
Civic work is judged on the day it opens and then again every year for four decades. That changes what is worth spending money on: the roof build-up, the door ironmongery, the acoustic separation between the hall and the reading room. We price a civic scheme on a sixty-year service life and show the client the two versions, because the cheaper one is sometimes genuinely the right answer and should be chosen deliberately.
Procurement here is public, so the tender is a document before it is a price. We keep a team who write them for a living.
INFRASTRUCTURE.
Rail and road interchanges, bridges, locks, quay walls and flood defence. Work measured in possessions rather than in weeks.
On infrastructure the programme is not ours. It belongs to whoever grants the possession, and it is handed out in fifty-two hour windows months in advance. Everything else follows from that: the amount we prefabricate, the size of the crane, whether a pour is even possible. We plan backwards from the window and rehearse the critical lifts off site, because a window missed is not a delay, it is a whole quarter.
Marine and lock work runs out of Rotterdam, where the plant and the divers are.
INDUSTRIAL.
Process buildings, energy terminals, cleanrooms, warehousing and the foundations that carry machines nobody wants to move twice.
An industrial building is a machine enclosure, and the machine is ordered before the building. So the design is driven by a vibration limit, a tonne of point load or a crane rail tolerance handed to us by a supplier in another country. We work to those first and shape the building around them, and we say plainly when a stated tolerance cannot be achieved in a poured slab rather than discovering it at commissioning.
Eindhoven runs this portfolio and keeps the survey and setting-out kit that millimetre tolerances need.
FOUR OF THE
TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY.
Each of the four below is here because something about it was hard enough to be worth writing down, rather than because it photographs well at dusk.
Open the projects