This is the reverse of the King’s clothes: the Whitehead Building was in the altogether and it needed dressing. Our brief was to ‘couture’ the building, so that it could stand confidently next to its Grade II-listed neighbour.

The project was shortlisted for the BCIA Awards 2009.

The fact that the building was listed during the design process meant that it took 12 months of negotiations with the Local Authority to agree to the removal of the roof and the addition of a further floor and plant.

A very complex brief and tight budget required extensive dialogue with the client group to establish value for money. Apart from the usual student needs, there is a series of highly-specialised acoustic labs used to study the technical intricacies of speech and hearing. The department of phonetics and linguistics is 80% female, for once a non-male bastion.

We were commissioned by Wordsearch to design an exhibition of buildings to be constructed in the City. The exhibition had a high educational content and allowed groups of visiting school children to design their own skyscraper. Great fun.

Over the years we have prepared various exhibition designs and break-out spaces for Pipers, who organise the London Stand during MIPIM at Cannes. As anyone who has been there will tell you, these events require stamina to sustain the pace!

Destined to become the leading architectural and urban design exhibition space in Central London, the New London Architecture gallery was formed on a modest budget to make a flexible adaptable space to exhibit a large model of Central London alongside a changing programme of themed exhibitions.

The cafe was conceived as a breakout area and small exhibition space within the overall gallery. It has matured into a popular and general destination point for people to touch base and catch up.

Following the success of the NLA Gallery, the Building Centre and NLA commissioned a suite of seminar rooms in the most neglected part of the Building Centre. The project was very challenging because of a limited budget, the constraints of the building, and the amount of heavy demolition required to open up the space.

This is our longest running project – over twelve years. Throughout this period of time we have supported the outreach organisation in their efforts to help turn their Arts Council grant into a new teaching facility. The support we have given over the years has ranged from feasibility studies to full planning permissions on various sites and buildings that were
offered to CME as possible match funding to the original Arts Council grant. The search goes on!

We were asked to produce two concept schemes for a high-profile corner site next to the old town hall in New Cross. One of the gateway sites to Goldsmiths, the brief called for the first scheme to be a ‘front door’ building to the campus to include: information centre, cafe, start-up design units and visiting postgraduate residential accommodation. The second, a low-key market place of design stalls.

This was a very fast track project to fit within the University summer term and recess. Designed in three weeks – completed on site in twelve. All built around the exam timetable, with all materials hoisted up five floors through a removed section of the cladding.

Like Chandler House at UCL and the Whitehead building at Goldsmiths, we have worked closely with the end users to provide a very bespoke design solution to their brief. In this case it was for a 24/7 library, and an RIBA Award.

We worked with Wordsearch and the developer Shaftesbury who were at the forefront in drafting the new China Town design guide for Westminster. Over a two-year period we worked together on a series of important nodal gateway projects in the China Town Conservation Area.

A few years ago we carried out a major renovation of an office building in West London. The building was then sold on to Leiths to create a new headquarters for their school of food and wine. The brief was challenging: to design, fit out and relocate the school at breakneck speed with an end date that was set in stone. We got cracking and the omelettes turned out perfectly.

This exhibition of Alan Williams’ photographs of places underground for the Clerkenwell Biennale was a true collaboration. The Evening Standard wrote: ‘If you can only go to one thing in the Biennale, then go to see Suburban’.

Following on from the success of Suburban, we embarked on Upshot. This was an exhibition of places above ground – again with photographs by Alan Williams – for the first London Festival of Architecture and located on the terraces at the National Theatre. It was another critical success with a double-page spread in the Guardian.