PHILOSOPHY

The opportunity to create a better environment is vast and challenging. The improvement could be as small an item as street furniture or as large as development within historical centres.

As a practice, we believe in working to improve the environment we live in, and we believe that thoughtful and careful design contributes to create a better society and to promote harmony between those who participate in it.

Our mission statement is to produce design of the highest quality because we believe that design can influence the way we live and our built environment.

We believe in building on the culture we have inherited as the foundation for our new ideas. At the same time, we embrace technological advancement and the opportunities it offers to our design.

In this age of rapid expansion of global communications, we are able to see and absorb events far away in other cultures and the new creations they generate. Their relative ease of access is positive and at the same time challenging. As we need to understand the culture we have inherited, so we need to understand the new cultures we have access to and assess objectively how they can enrich our society and ourselves. Success in achieving our goals requires us to explore many different layers of knowledge, in a journey that takes us through areas as diverse as science, art, technology and personal beliefs, and their relationship with the multi-cultural society we live in.

In this search, the particular poetry of the space is of interest to us. It constitutes the domain of our creative process, where our ideas are given shape and body. In line with this vision, we believe that the creation of space, both old and new, depends to a great extent on the light and on the relationship between transparency and solidity. The technological advances in the usage of glass are of particular interest. They have enabled us to create spaces where the relationship between interior and exterior is complex and articulated.

We also believe in the importance of positive and negative, inside and outside space. The success of a new creation depends, to a large extent, on both the inside and the outside, which is the reason why the landscape plays an important role in our approach.

The climate is an equally decisive design parameter. We need to achieve a design which is both comfortable and uses no more energy than necessary. The buildings we produce have to be sensitive to the natural environment as well as to history and context. Our solutions strive to be sustainable by both reducing the demand for energy (for instance giving careful consideration to environmental parameters such as orientation, climate, prevailing winds, etc.), and reducing the loss of energy through the fabric of the building (for instance improving the thermal properties of the existing fabric where possible and specifying energy efficient materials in all newly-constructed elements). Equally, usage of good natural ventilation can reduce and even obviate the need for air conditioning.

We take particular care in the selection of materials and their usage in the development of our design concepts. Careful consideration is given to their appropriateness to a given context and to their ability to create a particular mood. In consultation with our Clients, we endeavour to ensure that a holistic approach to the selection and use of materials is maintained throughout the design process and during construction to achieve a coherent result.