INSIGHTS
21
Weston Williamson + Partners PRACTICE PROFILE
Now big players in the transport and master planning sectors, Weston Williamson + Partners have helped shape infrastructure across London and the wider UK, with major clients including Crossrail and HS2. Sébastien Reed speaks to partners Chris Williamson and Philip Breese to hear how the firm is broadening its horizons
Williamson, Andrew Weston and Steve Humphreys continued, and efforts were transposed from coursework into competitions. The three lived and breathed architecture, working evenings and weekends alongside their day jobs to develop their ideas for competitions. As Williamson simply explains, “We worked well together”.
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During a roughly five year period, the architects accumulated a strong portfolio of designs – some realised, most not – which they entered into the RIBA ‘40 under 40’ exhibition which sought to identify budding architects showing promise. An enthusiastic response from visitors led to a leap of faith by the trio, and in 1985 WW+P was born.
Initial projects came in the main from small developers buying modest industrial plots in and around London, which WW+P would take to the planning approval stage, often to be sold on to the subsequent developer. Williamson comments: “Unless you’ve got a lot of money or contacts, that’s the only way to start.” Over time, the prestige of projects undertaken gradually increased, and in 1991 WW+P were selected by architect Roland Paoletti and London Underground chairman Sir Wilfrid Newton to join the design team for the Jubilee Line extension, where they designed the London Bridge stop on the line. This was the ‘big break’ that would power the practice’s future trajectory.
Approach & remit
“Some architects only want to do architecture the way they want to do it,” says Williamson, “others who will do exactly what the client asks for and nothing else.” The founding partner endorses a position “somewhere in the middle” where client’s decisions are appropriately questioned, but not so much that the client’s overarching vision is compromised – “Architecture is a cyclical process, you have to be able to adapt in collaboration with the client.”
The architects cite a “rational clarity” that characterises their approach, which Chris elaborates as taking account of context –
A project for Metro Melbourne to improve the city’s underground rail network spurred the opening of the firm’s first Australia office
the site, the way the sun moves over it, its immediate surroundings, and more – and “working with the brief, rather than trying to impose something as a style.” The clarity aspect is, for WW+P, about how they design, rather than a particular style. The practice has deployed this effectively across their comprehensive project portfolio, which consists primarily of transport and infrastructure, master planning, and mixed-use residential schemes in the UK, India, China, and Australia.
Growth model
Senior partner Philip Breese’s appointment came later in 2005, heading up a diversifying team working on mixed-use and housing projects as part of the founders’ aim of future-proofing the practice. Introducing more strata of partners, particularly earlier on, and becoming a limited liability partnership in 2013, has produced highly beneficial overlapping layers of experience between partners
ADF AUGUST 2018
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espite parting ways to work for different firms upon graduating from Leicester School of Architecture in the late ‘70s, an early collaboration forged between Chris
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