CTBUH Video Interview - Ian Simpson

It is a really, really beautiful building that could only ever be built in London. It's a building that will be expensive to build. It's a very singular form, a glass twin-skin structure, very organic in its form, and it's located at the bridgehead of Blackfriars Road. We've just about started on site now with St George after 10 years. It's taken 10 years to get from starting the project to actually making a start on site, not dissimilar to The Shard. That's one of the issues of trying to design and build anything in London: it takes time, the process is quite protracted. But I think it's going to be a very spectacular building, very elegant, very slender. It's half the width of Swiss Re and it would fit inside Swiss Re at its widest point. It's asymmetrical in form, not a marker, not a totem type building, but a sort of quite organic, quite fluid form building. It's all residential, 274 apartments, which are starting to be marketed at the moment. We've just started on site with the marketing suite, and we'll be following up with foundations and so on for the main structure later this year. So after 10 years of work, it's really exciting to start seeing that building come forward. It's 170 meters, but it's also a building that, unlike most of the tall buildings in London, is a residential tall building of that scale. There's only one or two others on the outskirts of the city. This one is actually quite close to St. Paul's, so it has quite an impact on the heritage center of London. So it is important that it's being thought about quite rigorously. It's been through an appeal process, it's been quite a difficult planning process, but I'm hoping that it will be a really beautiful addition to London's skyline.

I think the fact we've had a recession as well has probably added about three years to that. But it took at least five years to get planning, and then it's taken the other five to actually get it out of administration and new purchaser St. George buying it, developing it, taking it through detail. So for a building of that scale, it is a long process. When compared with other projects we've worked on in the northern cities, for instance, where the process isn't the issue, it's value. It's a complete reverse to what we've got in London really. It takes a long time to get planning, but it's sustainable, it's valuable, it's viable as an asset. Whereas if you look at projects in Manchester or Leeds or Birmingham where we've worked, from going with a concept for a tower building in Manchester to actually starting on site, that includes the whole planning process and the tender process, took me 11 months. So it's one tenth of the time it's taken me to actually get on site in London. But that's because in cities other than London, they actually welcome change, they embrace investment, they need jobs, they need an influx of money and people. And as long as the design quality is of a high enough standard, then the northern cities are there to basically welcome that sort of investment and development. It's been a much more generous, much easier process through planning to design and build tall buildings outside of London. However, the reverse of that is that at the moment, we're coming out of a recession hopefully, values couldn't sustain the building of a tall building in Manchester right now. It may take another four or five years before those values get to a height where they're more than the build cost and there's some development potential there. So it's a cyclical process. We managed to build a couple of really interesting projects just at the peak. If we tried to do those projects now, they just wouldn't happen.

In terms of game changers, obviously those cities are quite industrial, tough cities. The cities themselves are quite small. The city center of Manchester will fit five times inside London's congestion zone, let alone London itself, which is obviously a global city. So you can't start deciding in those cities where you might put tall buildings because the city itself is so small. So you've got to take each opportunity as it comes along. And of course it's going to have an impact, visible impact, but there's no reason why the juxtaposition of old and new shouldn't be a positive thing. New world cities deal with that all the time. So in cities like Manchester, it's not Siena, it's not Rome, it doesn't have a historic body of architecture to protect and preserve. It has some quite tough, robust Victorian architecture, but new modern buildings are the next layer, the next generation, and they can sit quite comfortably. They are visible, but then those cities need to start generating a cityscape, a skyline, because they've got to pass the message on that actually this city is not about old mills and clogs and working class perceptions that people have of these northern cities, but actually they're cities that can offer great quality of life and can offer a workforce that makes that sort of transition in terms of projects and other things sustainable. And they welcome that investment and they need that investment to sustain themselves as a city into the future. And the cities that you've mentioned, Manchester, Liverpool certainly, have all had their past with high rises in the form of public housing, which I know has served to shape people's attitudes. Are those changing now? I mean, again, contemporary architects always get branded with the point blocks of the 1950s and 60s. I can assure you I wasn't involved in any of those, and nobody operating now is. Unfortunately, that was a typology that was spread around the country, it wasn't just the northern cities, I mean London has its share. And it was just an expedient way of creating housing by numbers. And unfortunately, there was poor construction, very limited maintenance, and they were rented to people who didn't want to be in there. It's a complete reverse of what we're trying to achieve now in cities like Manchester, where we're trying to create high-end residential in the city. Traditionally, people who had money left the city and they lived in the leafy suburbs. Now we're trying to create an environment where it's not just the poor that are left in the city, but the people who want to be there. It's 45 seconds into the city from a home using a lift. So if you can create the right quality residential in the city center, you can start to address the balance between the wealthy and the poor, which is a complete reverse to a place like London again.

It's, I mean, this particular building was designed very specifically for its place on the bridgehead next to the river, next to a busy road. So it's quite a dynamic, quite a lively building, organic building with a sense of movement. And I wanted the building to touch the ground quite lightly, so that it's basically the core and a reception at ground floor level. You then are able to give over as much public realm as possible to the pedestrians. And we've created a new public space around the building as a gathering space for the three buildings on the site. So I think what we're trying to achieve where possible, and you can only really do that with quite small footprint buildings. Once you get to an office floor plate, you can't do it, you need a much bigger site. But with a residential building, you can bring it down to a very delicate point and create a public realm around it that is as large as you can possibly create.

Pleasure.