The Progress 1000: London's most influential people 2015 - Architects

Award-winning British architect: Sir David Chipperfield CBE
Sean Gallup 2014 Getty Images
16 September 2015

Herzog & de Meuron

Architects

They may be Swiss, but these guys are soaring ahead, creating major new landmarks all over London. Best known for conversions of the Bankside Power Station and Tate Modern, the company is currently working on the revamp of Chelsea FC’s stadium at Stamford Bridge and a cylindrical skyscraper in Canary Wharf as part of a nine-hectare masterplan.

O’Donnell + Tuomey

Architects

They’ve been turning out beautiful buildings in Ireland for years but only now is the long-standing husband and wife team of Sheila O’Donnell and John Tuomey making its mark in London. Their admired sculptural students’ union at the London School of Economics may have been just been pipped to the major awards but a massive consolation is winning the Olympicopolis competition. The new cultural quarter for the East End is being masterplanned by team-mates Allies & Morrison but it is the Dubliners who will provide the wow factor.

Witherford Watson Mann

Architects

The practice that won the Stirling Prize for creating a modern house out of a castle ruin is also making a virtue of collaging London’s scrappy zones into a contemporary romance. Work will soon start on the Walthamstow Wetlands to create a bosky waterside park, while at Elephant & Castle the aim is to tame the northern roundabout, incorporating it into the Bankside Urban Forest. A new drawings gallery for the Courtauld has also just finished.

Simon Allford

Founding partner, AHHM

His King’s Cross ground-scraper for Google is still on the drawing board after the company asked for something more ambitious but Allford and his practice, Allford Hall Monaghan Morris are, after years of assiduous networking, the go-to people for big commercial buildings in London — including the under-construction White Collar Factory at Old Street Roundabout. Allford is also busily trying to rescue London’s Architecture Foundation from oblivion, pumping in his time and money to the design promotion institute.

Peter Murray

Chairman, New London Architecture

Cycling fiend and behind-the-scenes power broker between London’s architects and developers, Duracell bunny Murray has a long reach. The former magazine editor runs both Wordsearch, a blue-chip architectural communications company, and New London Architecture — the increasingly influential central London exhibition and conference centre on Store Street where the capital’s future is debated. Fingers in many another meaty pie including the London Festival of Architecture, the Architecture Club and the revived London Society.

Ellis Woodman

Director, Architecture Foundation

Architectural journalist Ellis Woodman has been picked by Foundation chairman Simon Allford to reinvigorate the Architecture Foundation — once the capital’s hub for architectural chat but too long focused inwards on the profession. Woodman, an architect himself, was editor of the trade title Building Design and is the critic for the Daily Telegraph. The not-for-profit will be focusing on the design issues that London’s constant growth stirs up.

Stanton Williams

Architects

Under the radar modernists, Alan Stanton and Paul Williams have done more than most to spruce up London but do so with a quiet elegance. Past outings such as Sloane Square and the new square outside King’s Cross station are now being followed up by remodelling the public areas of the Royal Opera House, a new wing for Great Ormond Street that will tidy a scrappy corner of Bloomsbury and the new plaza and underground entrance at Centrepoint.

Will Palin

Co-founder, East End Preservation Society

One of a band of vocal heritage activists challenging developer avarice. The former secretary of Save Britain’s Heritage, Palin — the son of Monty Python’s Michael — set up the East End Preservation Society with TV’s Dan Cruikshank to check the bulldozers in east London. Proposals to rebuild historic Shoreditch street Norton Folgate and the adjacent Bishopsgate Goodsyard loom large in his mind. Will the new East End be a balanced blend of old and new or is the whole place fair game for a flattening?

Sir Terry Farrell

Architect

His architectural review for the last government may have been kicked into the long grass but London’s leading post-modernist still has pull. He is now part of a national (and very conservative) housing design panel set up by David Cameron to get more homes built faster. Even Sir Terry has admitted that the panel should find a place for less traditionalist thinkers. His own masterplans for Old Oak Common and Earl’s Court, meanwhile, are set to reshape west London.

Graham Morrison

Masterplanner, Allies and Morrison

According to a fellow architect “no one crosses the street to look at an Allies and Morrison building” but that hasn’t stopped London’s safest pair of hands from prospering. These days it is masterplanning that is Morrison’s métier and his vision is shaping most of east London — the proposed Olympicopolis cultural complex included. His Wood Wharf plan will see Canary Wharf radically extended by 30 new buildings.

Sir David Chipperfield

Architect

Himself a Royal Academician, Chipperfield’s proposals for the Royal Academy are likely to have a profound effect on south-east Mayfair once completed. His scheme will connect Burlington House on Piccadilly with the former Museum of Mankind on Burlington Gardens. In the process a cultural desire line to the commercial galleries quarter north of the RA will be reinforced. An exacting critic of low-brow design, he has disowned his last building in Milan after a row over its flooring.

Julian Robinson

Head of architecture, Crossrail

With the new entrance to Tottenham Court Road Tube now open, the first glimpse of Robinson’s design vision for Crossrail is available. Reaction has been negative to the stark geometries that have replaced the Paolozzi murals. The aesthetic decisions that will affect the daily commutes of thousands will steadily come to light over the next year or so and Robinson is well aware of the burden on his shoulders.

Transport architect: Julian Robinson Adrian Lourie

Dame Zaha Hadid

Architect

Hadid’s business must be thriving because she’s taking over the old Design Museum at Shad Thames as a place to store her archives. She suffered a setback when Tokyo pulled the plug on her Olympic stadium design but overseas commissions coming thick and fast will soften the blow. Just completed a climbing museum at the top of an Italian mountain and has the job of building the new parliamentary complex in her native Baghdad to look forward to.

Boundary-pushing British architect: Dame Zaha Hadid Brigitte Laco
Brigitte Laco

David Adjaye

Architect

That he’s been chosen to design President Obama’s memorial library remains speculation for the moment but Adjaye is already making his mark in the States. This summer saw the completion of housing and a museum in Sugar Hill, New York, while October will see the opening of both his home for The National Museum of African American History and Culture — part of Washington DC’s Smithsonian complex — and the Aishti Foundation in Beirut. Little doing in London though.

Jim Eyre

Founding director, Wilkinson Eyre

Who has been entrusted with rebuilding Battersea Power Station’s iconic chimneys? Jim Eyre. After a first flourish building bridges up and down the country, Eyre and fellow partner Chris Wilkinson’s Clerkenwell-based practice has matured into a studio that is bringing crafted polish to everything from the Wellcome Collection’s new suite of galleries to university departments and libraries in Oxford. At Battersea, Wilkinson Eyre is remodelling the power station itself around a new atrium.

Amanda Levete

Founder, AL_A

PR-savvy Levete is one of architecture’s consummate networkers given to making cannily quotable statements such as “I switch off by having sex”. Her new wing for the V&A is coming out of the ground while a cultural complex in Lisbon is opening its doors. Levete is a regular on both the design and political social scenes on the arm of husband Ben Evans, director of the annual London Design Festival.

Innovative architect: Amanda Levete

Haworth Tompkins

Architects

With its National Theatre expansion now just about complete, 2014 Stirling Prize-winner Haworth Tompkins is turning its attention to a clutch of other London cultural buildings including the fire-ravaged Battersea Arts Centre, the nearby Royal Academy of Dance and another phase of the Royal College of Art’s campus. It’s not all stagecraft, there’s some major housing too — including the housing-led regeneration of Canning Town and of Kensington & Chelsea’s Silchester Estate.

Patrick Lynch

Founder, Lynch Architects

From building low-key community projects in fringe London, Lynch has (instantly it feels) jumped to redesigning half of Victoria Street for Land Securities with offices, apartments and a library. With a fearsome intellect and a passion for the Baroque, Lynch takes no prisoners with his contemporary architecture informed by history. Some of the Victoria towers that Lynch is working on with architect wife Claudia Lynch open this summer.

Eric Parry

Founder, Eric Parry Architects

With undeniable nous Parry has followed the banking money from projects on the City of London fringes to a series of elegant offices around Piccadilly. His contemporary twist on traditional materials creates office buildings with grace and appeal. Rents at the just completed 8 St James Square have broken UK records but Parry —admired by other architects as a thinker and teacher — is more interested in art; incorporating sculpture and ceramics directly into his facades.

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