A Gathering Of Idealists

from BDP 2021 The Big Conversation

by BDP – Building Design Partnership

Chief Executive's Review Of The Year

Hugh Pearman

It all began, this interdisciplinary design business, with a man who saw no point in narrow specialisation or barriers between professions. George Grenfell Baines, born in 1908 as the son of a railwayman in Preston, north-west England, was one of those people who had no favoured subject at school, could do any of them as well as any other. He was interested in everything, and he carried this through into his professional life. He became an architect, starting his own practice in 1937, but he was anything but an architectural exceptionalist. What he wanted – inspired in his youth by Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus and left-wing idealism - was a place where all the professions involved in designing buildings could work together on equal terms.

So in 1961 he summoned the partners and associates of what by then was Grenfell Baines and Hargreaves to a summit meeting at his Anglesey retreat, Bryn Mor. The practice was buoyant, having just won the competition for the new Pilgrim Hospital in Boston, Lincolnshire. The week-long bonding session was to thrash out the guiding principles of what was to become BDP. Grenfell Baines wrote: “Out of this will come, we hope, a new structure for the firm that will enable all who work with us to grow and change while the practice can grow and change as well. We have tried to plan ‘for ever’ – why not?”

More professions – especially civil and structural engineering – were soon added, and the Anglesey initiative rapidly resulted in a very successful model that also proved to be very resilient. Personality-based practices come and go but the interdisciplinary BDP, its founder’s name self-erased, survived in good health despite all the usual economic ups and downs. Sixty years later it is a global federation of 16 studios with a third of its total workload outside the UK, divided equally between public and private clients, spanning most sectors. It’s not unique in that trajectory but what’s interesting is the way the firm has held onto and reinforced its progressive ideals, specifically its strong sense of social responsibility.

Those 60 years are waymarked with some pretty distinguished buildings and places, some now listed, some still in the process of being built. My personal favourites are:

1960s:

Preston Bus Station (its distinctive serrated profile deriving from a very fresh look at how to make the levels of car parking above it read as a coherent building). Dating from a time when the north-west was a thriving industrial area and private car ownership was burgeoning, this was conceived with air terminals in mind rather than the draughty canopies of conventional bus stations. You waited in comfort inside, proceeding to your bus through a numbered gate when your departure was called. It’s great that this unique building became a national cause celebre when it was threatened with demolition and is now not only saved and listed, but restored. Transport patterns have changed over the years but it still serves its original purpose, now with supplementary uses being planned.

1970s:

Another now-listed building, an extraordinary place, is the headquarters for what was the UK’s largest mortgage and savings provider, the Halifax Building Society. Diamondshaped in plan, elevated on four stout legs (also diamondplan) to make a covered plaza, it sails above the rooftops of this hilly Yorkshire milltown like a bronze-clad battleship. The mortgage deeds and correspondence of a quarter of the nation’s home owners, in those pre-digital times, were stored in a huge basement vault, retrieved on demand by a robot system. This was the era of Bürolandschaft or organicallyplanned open-plan offices, as was BDP’s pioneering first studio in Preston. BDP designed everything right down to the smallest details of the interior design, and returned to the building for interior upgrades in 1996 and 2002.

1980s:

Postmodernism was in the air and the start of the decade found the youthful me working in the London studio as an in-house editor, an unusual role for a design firm at the time. As Thatcherism took hold, this was the moment of maximum danger for the BDP ethos: other partnerships were floating themselves on the stock market and (briefly) getting rich on the proceeds. Commendably, BDP with its long-term view chose not to go down that route: most of those who did fell by the wayside as the economy contracted and the unforgiving market tore them to shreds. From this period comes a commercial yet democratic building: the first modern UK multiplex cinema, The Point, in Milton Keynes. Ten screens! Restaurant, bar and nightclub! Designed for maximum impact on minimum money, a reflective ziggurat within its red-painted steel pyramid frame, it was not intended for a long life but nonetheless lasted into the 2020s, latterly housing a charity. It is still there at the time of writing, though probably not for long, despite moves to save it. It is fondly remembered: it marked an important cultural moment.

1990s:

The St Peter’s University Campus, University of Sunderland was a ten-year programme over three phases, started in the mid 1990s, to make a complete university campus on the site of former shipyards on the north bank of the River Wear. This academic township was therefore as much an act of masterplanning and urbanism as of architecture. It also marked the clearest expression yet of BDP’s increasingly Scandinavian-inflected design direction at that time, a particular interest of its then design lead, later chair, Tony McGuirk. In his youth he had worked with Anglo-Swedish architect Ralph Erskine on the extraordinary Byker Wall project in nearby Newcastle. So the St Peter’s campus was doing a lot of things at once, from post-industrial regeneration via interlinked external and internal public space to setting a marker for a different, more organic and expressive kind of modernism. It was an important statement of intent for the wave of 35 new British universities, former polytechnics, launched by the 1992 Further and Higher Education Act. Its urban-led design approach came to permeate BDP’s design thinking, not least in more recent university projects such the XJTLU South Campus in Suzhou, China.

2000s:

Nominated for the Stirling Prize, Liverpool One was a £1bn project covering 17 hectares of this great city, running from the centre down towards the previously somewhat disconnected waterfront. A complete mixed-use scheme including refurbishment and new-build, knitted into and restoring the streetscape, it was a masterplan to which BDP, as lead designers, contributed several buildings and public spaces of their own while inviting a roster of other distinguished architects to contribute as well.

It’s a bit strange in places with its changes of level and there’s always the quibble that this is privately-owned streetscape rather than wholly public realm, but it all hangs together as an urban composition, a good place to be. It does not lock itself in, being capable of incremental change over time.

2010s:

Fascinating because it demonstrates how an educational campus can form part of a larger masterplan in a topographically and climatically challenging area. One of the fruits of BDP’s Indian studio, the Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi is set in a relatively remote area of the Western Himalayas, running up a steep wooded river valley and – though large and with a variety of buildings - organised around a village square with radiating streets. It carefully adopts the regional construction vernacular and materials, part of what BDP describes as its ‘people and planet friendly approach’. It’s interesting to note that in one way, nothing has changed: just as there was always autonomy and regional variation - even rivalry - present in BDP’s studios around the UK in the early days, so it goes with the expanding number of international studios today, which become part of their locale and collaborate with like-minded consultants.

**Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi**

2020s:

Healthcare buildings have been a strand running through BDP’s work since the very start, and in recent years the practice has been driving considerable changes in the sector. The Dublin Children’s Hospital is in the St James Hospital campus in the south-west of the centre. It is an enormous project and – in common with recent examples such as Liverpool’s Alder Hey Hospital – does things differently. It provides a large elevated garden and play area embraced by the oval plan of the wards around it, with a remarkable sequence of lofty circulation spaces winding between the departments below it. It responds well to the challenge of breaking down the bulk of such necessarily large places and gives them a genuinely civic quality.

Two projects sum up the reach of BDP today. One is enormous, long-term, complex and of historic and symbolic national importance: the restoration and renewal of London’s Palace of Westminster (the Houses of Parliament) and a large section of its associated parliamentary estate. The other is the modest but revolutionary 2015 Enterprise Centre, Norwich Research Park. That is a collaborative project between architects Architype and BDP’s engineers, an exemplar of a fully sustainable, ultra-low carbon commercial building intended to last 100 years, made largely with locally sourced and made materials.

The future of everyone depends on such mutually beneficial and responsible design thinking becoming mainstream. It’s encouraging that BDP has recently implemented a social value strategy that embraces long-term sustainable thinking together with civic responsibility as part of its overall contribution to society. As Grenfell Baines said in the very different context of 1961: “We have tried to plan ‘for ever’. Why not?”