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23


VIEW POINT


Michael Barker of Stephen George + Partners discusses why architects need to have a better understanding of the requirements of developers, contractors and tenants


s architects, Stephen George + Partners has decades of experience designing offices – sometimes we do this for developers or contractors as their design and build architect and sometimes for occupiers. Imagine, then, working for all three simultaneously! This is the situation I found myself in recently when we decided to design and deliver our own new office building in Leicester.


A


Having occupied premises in Leicester city centre for nearly 50 years, the opportunity arose to acquire a site at Grove Park near J21 of the M1, and design and build our own offices. To facilitate this a group of partners and staff established a pension fund to act as developer and Stephen George + Partners entered into a 15-year lease to rent the premises. The pension fund raised the funds and acquired the site. The pension regulations required this be a legitimate arms-length operation with trustees acting in the interests of the pension fund members. Obviously, we needed an architect, so Stephen George + Partners was appointed to carry out the design and obtain planning approval. They were then novated to the design and build contractor during the construction process. We also had to consult ourselves over a complex set of requirements as tenant on the fit-out! That’s four different hats to wear at the same time and, as you can imagine, it wasn’t without its challenges. Often the requirements of these differing roles within the process conflict with one another and the project proved to be an interesting learning experience.


Developer insight


As architects working for a developer we want to produce great architecture, maximise space, produce a design that will appeal to occupiers and get through the planning process. We also need to design to


a budget that is usually quite tight and sometimes quite restrictive for the architectural team’s design aspirations. Taking on the role of developer, however, gave us quite an insight as to the challenges our clients often face. For a start, the development had to deliver value for the pension fund under the pension rules, which immediately set some limits in terms of where we could take the building architecturally. Equally, we couldn’t just design the offices solely for Stephen George + Partners as the tenant; we also had to have a view on it being marketable if the tenant vacated the building at a future date. In other words, it needed to be a sensible, rational, buildable project.


Conflicted contractor


As architects under a standard design and build contract we work for the contractor who relies on our technical competence,


the ability to deliver information to a tight timescale, being flexible in responding to their ideas about alternative solutions and producing a building that meets all the client’s expectations at the most economic cost. However, this relationship became a little more opaque during the construction of our own offices as the contractor had difficulty understanding that the client and architect were not the same. As the contractor also perceived us as their client, they found it difficult to give instructions to our team on site because they felt they were telling the client what to do. This did lead to issues when our architects commented on proposals put forward by the contractor or their subcontractors – the contractor felt that they couldn’t disagree when perhaps they should have done, inevitably costing more money and further discussions down the line as to who was going to pay for it.


ADF APRIL 2019 WWW.ARCHITECTSDATAFILE.CO.UK


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