Inside the Archive - Gerard Evenden

There was a big economic downturn and the practice shrank to almost nothing, and I was unemployed. Then out of the blue I got a phone call, and Alf said, 'We're wondering whether you'd be interested in coming around to do some drawings.' So I came and did some drawings, and after about seven or eight weeks, David Nelson came up to me and said, 'We like what you're doing, why don't you just stay?' I said, 'Good idea,' so I stayed. What I always thought was really good was the consistency. Things changed, but people stayed; we moved together and grew together. That is a very nice thing. You feel a camaraderie, a link between us because we've worked together for a long time, and I think that is one of the biggest strengths of what's happened. There was this big job called Canary Wharf, and at that time Canary Wharf station was going through a difficult period; it was quite complicated, and the client was very demanding. I was asked to step in and take over, so I took that on and then ran Canary Wharf for the next 10 years, which was a really good experience because if you go from beginning to end and end in a building and you do everything, nothing after that really fazes you. Norman was very heavily involved in that one, and we had a very unusual site because it was very narrow. When you put a central core into the building, it never made sense because you had floor plates on either side of the core and very little at the edges. So we were able to drive an offset core, and then because we had an offset core, we could start pushing environmental ideas. We had ideas for naturally ventilating the atrium, chilled beams, chilled ceilings, which in Australia nobody had done before. Now most of the towers in Australia the city supports offset cores, which is very unusual in the world, and I think it really did start with us. I think the most interesting thing is linkage—the way things are linked together. There's a relationship between anything mechanical and technological. I share some of the same passions as Norman about cars and vehicles, and understanding the development of vehicles and mobility, and relating that to buildings and how buildings and cars interrelate is something becoming more and more important. Cities were driven by the car, and now they're becoming much more integrated in terms of how they work together. In practice, there's always been a technological drive to have the latest technology. When I first came here, all architectural practices used dye line printers, horrible machines that used ammonia and stank. When I arrived here, the first thing that shocked me was they had photocopiers, big photocopiers. The practice always had the latest gadgets, driven by Norman. There was always a belief that if you give people opportunity, give them the tools, and get the right people, they'll take the opportunity.