Gavin Elliott, BDP: The Big Interview

I ONCE had a fabulous row with BDP.

It was with their London office. They'd designed the west side of New Cathedral Street, the one that begins with Zara and ends with Harvey Nichols. I thought it was weak and confused, bits of towers and glass bauble detail and worst of all, fake red tile panels pointlessly referring to Manchester’s industrial past.

We want to produce outstanding award-winning architecture without the tantrums.

How could do they that I asked when the Manchester office had given us the Marks & Spencer (now M&S and Selfridges) opposite? Whereas the Harvey Nichols block was weak and uncertain, BDP’s work on the east side of New Cathedral Street was a bold, assertive city block, clear and consistent.  

The answer it seemed lay in the freedom of each BDP office to come up with its own design solution. So from the same architectural firm you could get two utterly different buildings. There was and is no ‘Starchitect’.

Weak London BDP on the left, bold Manchester BDP on the right

I wasn't aware of this jolly word - 'starchitect' - until Gavin Elliott, head of the Manchester BDP office explained it to me. BDP stands for Building Design Partnership and it doesn't have a big name leader.  

“When George Grenfell Baines founded the company in 1961 in Preston he expressly didn't want this,” says Elliott, who's been with BDP since 1989. “He wanted to avoid the big ego, he wanted a shared committment to work. He wanted the work to speak for itself and the building to be known for its own qualities not those associated with a Starchitect.

“The ego gets in the way of so many architects and practices, without that pressure people can think more clearly, not worry so much. Not having the Starchitect liberates us. At the same time it means that the company can roll on without wondering where to go when the Starchitect retires or dies. People see the company name not the personality of the individual.”

I press the point. But humans love the notion, for better or worse, of the leader, the person they can identify with, I say. We talk of the big names in the architectural world,  Norman Foster, Daniel Libeskind, even locally, people such as Ian Simpson and Roger Stephenson.

“You’re right to a certain extent,” says Elliott, “the big names do attract attention. They are often seen as representing certain things, glamour, instant awareness for buildings. But we find most clients don’t want that, and they don’t want the price tag that comes with the name. They want the best solution at the price they can afford. It’s less about starry names and more about practicality.”

We’re talking in the cafe at CUBE on Portland Street. The gallery is celebrating BDP’s work recent work in the UK and worldwide, featuring models and images of award-winning North-West projects such as BDP’s own Manchester studio building, the Abito apartments in Salford, and the RIBA Stirling Prize-nominated Liverpool One shopping centre. The variety here speaks for itself. It could be called a little chaotic, although it’s always carefully delivered.

Cube exhibition

“The recent work perhaps represents a change of direction in the last decade,” says Elliott. “We wanted to create a more individual architecture. We’ve looked much more closely at the uses and the space we are to design. In our office for example (on Ducie Street) we’ve interpreted the building, I’d say, in a Manchester way.”

I ask him to explain this.

“Take, The Point, at LCCC (Lancashire County Cricket Club) or the Abito Buildings for instance. These were all built to very tight budgets but we wanted to give them real identity. It’s the art of the possible, how can you take a brief and make it memorable. That’s about responding to schemes as they are, not according to a set of rigid principles. We want to use technology in an interesting way so we can be bold.

“At the same time buildings should be an expression of an idea. The Point at LCCC has ruffled a few feathers I know. But we’re talking Lancashire here, not the stuffiness of Lords. Cricket has been far more of a working class sport here, so we’ve gone for vibrant colours. Why should every cricket building look like a cheap version of Lords?”

LCCC - The Point

The discussion moves on. We look back at the history of BDP and discuss the fate of one of its most famous buildings, Preston Bus Station.

Architectural critic Jonathan Glancey described this in 2007 as ‘one of the most dramatic British public buildings of the 1960s. A provincial bus station with all the architectural clout of an international airport’. It’s currently under threat of demolition, the site ear-marked for a shopping centre. Elliott is non-committal about the structure, “You can’t overlook the fact that buildings have a function. It’s beautiful but time moves on.”

Practical as ever, part of the BDP mantra. And honest.

I ask him about the way architects seem never to be able to admit error. Architects are masters of the excuse, they blame the budget, the brief, the demands of the clients that compromised their wonderful designs. 

Manchester, indeed all cities, have some turkeys of buildings but no architect will hold their hands up and say, 'We were crap then weren't we?'

It's still amusing and annoying to read the excuses Wilson and Womersley made for their Arndale Centre back in the seventies. Everybody knew it was a horror from the outset. One of the partners of Wilson and Womersley even said at the time that after they'd been given the brief they'd known "it wouldn't work". They still took the job. He also said, "That's the architect's lament. You can't do much about it except hope that in years to come they will restore it to what we intended." Very big of him. Meanwhile a city suffers the consequences for decades.

"I know what you mean about taking the blame," says Elliott. "And architects don't have to take everything they offered. If they do and in the end a project is a disappointment, then it's the architect's fault. It's clear that not all architects are equally skilled, but if you don't do a job right, you have to blame yourself not the brief, because in the end you thought you could create something worthwhile within the constraint that were already present?"

We change direction again. So where is the work at the moment? How is the UK market?

"It's very very slow," says Elliott. "Stalled really. The future in terms of architecture is presently in China, where we're working a lot. Whole towns are being planned there, infrastructure, schools, hospitals as well, on unprecedented scale and with amazing speed. Also in the Gulf states."

Nice work if you can get it no doubt, but what about ethical concerns?Work in the Emirates and the workforce might be indentured labour living in semi-slavery in appalling conditions. How can architects talk up the benefits of environmentally tight buildings, be all green and worthy, and ignore the fact their paymasters might have terrible human rights' records?

"I suppose," says Elliott, for once hesitant, "we can offer expertise and experience, and point to best practice. We're also part of a process of other countries improving themselves. There are certain places we wouldn't work, either they're too dangerous physically for our staff, or too poor in their human rights records."

But didn't they build in Libya when it was under Gaddafi?

"We did, but that was a hospital and people need hospitals so we don't think that was too morally dubious. It was also at the time when Britain and Tony Blair were thawing the relationship between the two countries. With hindsight...." he begins and trails off.

It's an uncomfortable moment and unresolved. "There is a whiff of colonialism," agrees Elliott, as we talk about the gold rush of Western architects across the recently poor parts of the world finding fat contracts. This time it's a conquest through intellectual property so to speak, where the newly rich of the world acquire a shiny piece of architecture from their rich Western friends along with a Rolls Royce and a Prada set of togs. 

BDP Abito, Greengate, Salford

There's one last question I can't resist returning to.

Would Elliott like to be given a £350m project to design, just the once. A project that had to be some fuck-off statement tower of 80 storeys, with enough spare cash to line all the public areas in marble; something someone would say, “Yea it’s an Elliott”, as they say, “Yea it’s a Foster”. Would he like to be the 'starchitect?"

Elliott smiles, “Not really. No, in fact, I wouldn’t. I think the way we do things at BDP really works. We don’t need the ego. All we want to do is balance our way with the way those people (the starchitects) behave. We want to produce outstanding award-winning architecture without the tantrums.”

Sometimes you can see behind the rebuttal of devilish temptation the struggle going on inside. You don’t get this with Elliott, this affable, intelligent man seems secure in the shared and sharing (how many times did he use those words?) ethos at BDP.  You walk round the exhibition and you see the team not the individual.

It’s like a sixties hippy dream made somehow concrete and commercial. It’s savvy niceness. It’s all there in Elliott’s constant use of the word ‘we’ not ‘I’. 

BDP 61-11 is at CUBE until November 5. Free. Open: Mon-Fri 12-5:30pm, Saturdays 12-5pm. CUBE is at 113-115 Portland Street, City, M1 6DW

You can follow Jonathan Schofield on Twitter here @JonathSchofield

Abito, Greengate, Salford Atrium

Cube exhibition

Cube exhibition

Piccadilly Station

BDP M&S