Hello, how are you doing, Benedict? 

Very good, thanks, David. 

Congratulations on your new role as chair of BDP, which you take up formally next week on 1 July. For people who don't know the mechanics of this, how is the role elected within BDP? 

We have a process where any principal of the practice can put themselves forward for the chair role, which comes up for re-election every two years, and you need to be nominated by at least three other principals. You then prepare a manifesto; so you set out your ambitions for the role, which to a large degree are up to you in terms of what you think should be done. And then about a week after the manifesto is published and shared with the other principals, you present to the board of BDP, which at this moment is composed of 27 principals, and you set out your stall in about a 20-minute presentation. There isn't always a rival, but there was this year, so there were a couple of us pitching for the role. And then there's an election process where everybody (all 27 principals) votes. 

And so, what essentially was your ‘stall’? Could you reduce that 20 minutes to one? 

Well, I think to capitalise on our unique ethos, really recover the essential ambition of the practice, which was to design environments for the common good; to think closely about user participation, which actually was a pioneering thing when the practice was founded in 1961. And, as I said in my election manifesto, we were sustainable before sustainability and social value became the popular buzzwords they are today. 

Yes. Just to mention Chris Harding, who you replace in the role - so he basically fought through five iterations of this election process, because he was there for 10 years, is that right? 

Yes, he was re-elected several times, I can't remember exactly, but he served nearly 10 years, so probably unprecedented in our history, I'm not sure anyone else has actually been chair for that long. He did a tremendous job through good times, and more recently some very difficult times, especially with Covid, and the financial economic headwinds of recent years. I think he did a lot to raise the bar in terms of design quality; he led the rebranding of the practice that we went through a couple of years ago; so a lot of achievements. And he kept his hand in as a designer, which I'm also keen to do, because we, Chris and I, in a sense grew up together. He was at the practice – he arrived a little bit before me – but essentially, we've been working together and collaborating and friends for all these years. 

Could you characterise a BDP project? 

I think the difficulty with giving it a kind of description is that we pride ourselves on designing projects that are special - bespoke to the client and context, which I think is something that is difficult to convey perhaps to new recruits, and sometimes even to clients, because we can't present a sort of style book or even a portfolio that has a kind of consistent look. 

Sometimes, when I show my own work over the years, which has ranged quite broadly in terms of sectors and locations, I feel really pleased to see that it all looks quite different. So, you know, we reinvent ourselves continuously. But I think the guiding thread, which, in fact Chris and I summarised in a booklet that we produced about two years ago, called Guiding Principles of Good Design, was to distil down the values that inform our process. Because those are the linchpins - thinking about people, thinking about place, actually thinking very carefully about the design process itself, the choreography of the interaction with the client. 

You also produced a book called Big House, Little City. Could you enlarge on the key position that you put in that book? 

So, the subtitle to the book is ‘Architectural design through an urban lens’, so really the essence of it is that if we think of buildings more in terms of cities, actually conceive of them as little cities, and thereby think very carefully about their context and not as monolithic kind of enclosed, segregated environments, but a part of a much broader social, historical, natural context, that will all be to the good. And conversely, if we think about cities not as some kind of amorphous mass but actually articulate them more closely as a series of interconnected architectural environments, that will also be a positive step. So it's really all about breaking down what have become the silos of experts. Each facet of the environment has been divided up by different people who are expert in a small piece of it, but we've lost the thread that binds everything together. The whole thing goes back to a phrase from the Renaissance, which appeared in the famous treatise of Alberti in the 15th century, where in the first book he says: if, as the philosophers say, the city is like a big house, why not think of the house as a little city, and the rooms within the house as little buildings? I had been struck by that phrase many, many years ago, and always thought it had an extraordinary resonance, and many architects have been influenced by it. So, the book looks at the origins of phrase, how it influenced architects. And then in the final part I have a section called Designing Buildings as Little Cities, and I show how it's an inspiring methodology, in essence, for tackling projects, which I found very useful. 

Is that, in essence, as close to the BDP ethos as we could get – or you would like? 

When you put it that way, in a sense, yes. I've observed our way of doing things, and some of the best buildings that we've done over the years, and I've always thought of them as incorporating what I call buildings within the building. So, we've taken what, maybe somebody else, you know, in a less inspired way, would have designed as a box - sometimes it's about thinking outside the box very deliberately, not confining everything to one kind of box, and then just sort of slinging the uses into stacks of floors, but actually saying, well, what is this all about? What are the component parts, and how can those be given greater expression? So, in a way, at heart, there's a functionalist idea contained within this. I do think perhaps subconsciously, without even knowing it, we've tended to do this. But maybe it's also the effect of having all disciplines in one house, so there's naturally a certain way of collaborating together and thinking about projects, which is, you know, at heart holistic - and always has been. 

How do you think BDP are perceived within the industry and within the wider public, I guess; the people who commission your buildings. 

Well, I think we've played to different audiences. We've always had a good balance between commercial and public sector work. Perhaps at this moment we're probably slightly more public sector than private, and the public sector really likes the multidisciplinary idea - not everyone - but a lot of clients, a lot of public bodies, like the idea of a one-stop-shop. They definitely respond to our devotion to user participation, the fact that we're very good at it, and have always done it, so that that plays well, whether it's a university or a hospital, or, a local authority, so that works very well. But at the same time, we've always been very successful, especially in, I would say, more complex mixed-use urban regeneration type commercial projects, which could be retail-led, they could be workplace-led, or they could even be hospital-led, actually. A lot of our big masterplans now have different catalysts, so where lots of different things come together, I think, is where we are at our strongest. 

What's your view of the current climate within architecture in terms of the economy? 

There's no disguising that the last few years have been very difficult, not just in the UK. We have an extensive global network of studios. Part of the idea was to be resilient, and it's helped, but actually most of our locations have been affected to differing degrees by the same sort of phenomena that are facing us in the UK. So: a sort of reduction in investment, a slowdown in work; also the breaking up of projects into multiple stages, which means it's very stop-start, which is much more difficult to resource. So, all those things have been very difficult, but I think the restructure that we've gone through recently, in terms of the way that we approach the sectors and share work across the studio network will make a big difference, I think, in setting us up to make the most of the recovery as it begins to happen. And I do think there are signs we can see that we're turning a corner at the moment. 

And lastly, if you were to look back on your term, be it in two years, four years, or 10, like Chris Harding, what would you hope to achieve? What will success look like for you, and for the practice? 

Well, a resurgence in terms of work, definitely. Doing more work outside the UK, so really realising the potential of our global network. Our ambition is to do 40 or 50% of our work outside the UK in the next few years, 

What is it at the moment? 

It's about 30%.

Okay, and is that eggs in baskets economically, geographically? 

Well, it's partly to the resilience points I made earlier, but really, because we are global, we're not a UK studio with satellites; we are genuinely now a group of architects, engineers, urbanists with bases around the world doing all sorts of interesting projects. And most importantly, actually, in relation to the Connected Capital piece that I read recently by NLA, we are super-connected, so we are putting together, and we always have done, teams from all our studios and collaborating in different ways on projects wherever they may be. So we bring the best possible people to the challenge. 

Well, good luck with your role. What will materially change in your day to day on the first of July? 

Well, actually, it happens to be a board meeting on the second of July, so I will be, you know, in the thick of it, within 24 hours. But I think the nice thing in preparing for the role is just meeting more and more people outside and inside the practice. I think that ambassadorial dimension is something I'm looking forward to; speaking to lots of different people about what we do, finding out more about them, connecting with different generations of designers within BDP in different parts of the practice. I think that's already started to happen, and it's very, very heartening and interesting. 

What are your emotions? Excitement? 

Yes, definitely. I said to somebody recently that it's a bit like winning a new project, you know, because a career, like an architect's is punctuated by projects, especially in my career, where the projects have tended to be big hospitals of late, or universities in the past. And so this is like a big project. It's like securing another project for the next few years, which I can throw myself into and live my experience of BDP in a different way. 

Magic. Well, good luck with it all. 

Well, thank you. Bye!