An architect once told me how disappointed he was that the hefty structure holding his building up didn’t match his vision of lightness. No matter, once sandwiched behind a few layers of drywall, the vision was restored!

In the case of our design for The Emory, the overarching image of the building reflects the most complex of the challenges it had to meet, how to overcome gravity where there was limited opportunity to come to ground? Gravity is a serious matter! Seductive imagery, made without its consideration, ultimately attracts excessive weight to counteract otherwise destructive forces. Architects cannot afford to be wasteful in this manner, and it is our duty to the environment and the economics of construction, not to be. The Emory occupies an extremely confined site, perched above many of the operational spaces that support the neighbouring The Berkeley hotel. From the outset, the team were confronted with an inordinate number of technical, spatial and logistics constraints. Ranging from the site’s close proximity to the Piccadilly Line tunnels, working alongside a hotel with over 90% occupancy, to having to share many common facilities and the need to maximise room space without impacting accessibility in use, all on a very tight site. This project has revealed a level of spatial and logistic complexity that would normally be lost in a building’s ‘fat’, its wall linings and backrooms.

Rather than resolving the myriad of challenges on an ad-hoc, case-by-case basis, we collectively adopted a clear design strategy, integrating the engineering solutions alongside space planning, to inform how we could problem solve, whilst maintaining the integrity of the concept from which we ultimately evolved the architectural response. Resolving these constraints has generated a building uniquely defined by its location and a unique hotel in itself.

The Emory, whilst sitting comfortably within the surrounding streetscape, maintains its independence, legible from its immediate neighbour despite being technically enmeshed with it. The building’s most distinguishing feature is its unconventional structure, a key design strategy to balance the load paths to ground, in a building with no conventional load bearing core that over sails adjacent subterranean spaces. This structure has even helped characterise the hotel’s branding lending both further integrity and timelessness.

Going beyond a linear design process

The close coordination across disciplines from the outset of design, necessary in a complex environment such as The Emory’s, is long embedded in our practice, driven by our desire to create straightforward, rationally organised buildings that project/celebrate integrity whilst creating uplifting, human-centric, spatial experiences.

A linear design process, whereby engineers take architects’ information and fill in the gaps, ideally in one pass, with structure, pipes, ducts and wires, squeezed into the architect’s ‘vision’, can, by definition, never deliver a finely honed integrated design. On the contrary I would describe this as ‘sloppy’ design, not to be mistaken with ‘loose fit’. This is design where interiors are ‘boxed out’ from exteriors and it encourages wasteful use of space and material.

If we are to have any chance of achieving net zero or better, we need to touch the earth much more lightly than this and that requires our buildings to work harder, to minimise excess and maximise efficiency. Only close collaboration from the outset, where architect alongside engineer, conceives the design together, can lead to buildings that stand a chance of achieving this goal.