Sustainable engineering team joins Foster + Partners
We are delighted to announce that the entire team at PHA Consult, the environmental design consultancy founded by Piers Heath and Edward Garrod, will be joining the creative team at Foster + Partners. Sustainability has been at the centre of the work of Foster + Partners for over four decades from Willis Faber and Dumas and the Sainsbury Centre in the 1970’s to our Abu Dhabi eco-city, Masdar most recently.
Creating a sustainable built environment is crucial if we are to work towards ‘one planet living’. To achieve this, environmental engineering needs to be integrated into any project at the outset of the design process.
We have been continuing to develop our range of skills and capabilities in order to provide a comprehensive design service to our clients. Piers Heath and his team of highly experienced creative engineers have been working alongside our architects for several years. It is therefore a logical step that they should now join the practice to provide seamless and integrated support for a future of more sustainable projects. We believe architects and engineers working together can learn from one another and grow in combined knowledge to deliver better buildings. It is a vision that Piers, his team and Foster + Partners share wholeheartedly. Piers will join as a Senior Partner, and Edward Garrod, Anis Abou-Zaki, Scott Smith and Keith Calder as Partners.
The arrival of Piers Heath’s team is part of a wider strategy to strengthen the range of services provided by Foster + Partners. Earlier in 2011, Roger Ridsdill Smith - Senior Partner - joined the office to head out a new structural engineering group together with environmental engineer Chris Trott, Partner. They will work closely with Piers and his team to further strengthen the office's environmental agenda and commitment to integrated design.
Lord Foster, Founder and Chairman, said:
“We have been embracing a holistic approach to environmental design since the early 1970s, when projects such as the headquarters building for Willis Faber & Dumas and the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts brought new thinking to bear on environmental design. In that sense, bringing creative engineering expertise back in-house marks a significant point of return to our roots. Looking ahead, it will allow us to move our creative thinking forward, and that is very exciting."
Mouzhan Majidi, Chief Executive, said:
“I am personally delighted that Piers Heath and his colleagues are now an integral part of our design team. We have worked closely together in the past on some of the practice's most important and ground-breaking projects, challenging and innovating in order to create richer environmental design solutions. This new venture is an opportunity to build on those strengths."
Source: Foster + Partners
