My most valued construction material

Light - that’s it in a word. For me it’s about light. You can play with texture and you can play with form but playing with light is amazing. I was on a site this morning for a house I’m designing and it’s really interesting that this house is at the stage where it’s got the roof on, walls up and windows in, but no electrics at all. As I walked the client through the house we were able to understand the light that would be in play most of the time.

Lighting will change a mood. Areas that are dark now, will be changed when you light them. Natural light is an amazing thing. We’ve all seen it, particularly on something like the sea. I do a lot of sailing. Sail on a grey day - everything’s grey. The sky is grey and the water is grey. The sun comes out and everything turns blue, crystallises and sparkles. The whole scene comes alive as the Natural light shifts.

Can the client really be part of the creative team?

When I was at Art College I had this great tutor. I remember once crit we had and there was a guy there who really wasn’t entertaining the concept and the tutor just lent back and said:

"Let me explain the difference between an artist and a designer. What an artist produces, even if it’s a commission for a painting, is pretty self-indulgent. They’re producing their piece, their work. But a designer isn’t a designer without a client, and you’ve got to view the client as part of the strategic design team."

Any time I’ve been involved in design, it only works well when there is a fantastic partnership between the client and the designer. It’s about the skill of marrying those things together and sometimes knowing when you need to put your best foot forward and say: "Sorry that won’t work" or when you need to listen, invite their comments and learn from their perspective.

Design Impact

One of my favourite stories is when I went to visit a school in a very deprived area. This was before Oasis were managing the school. I walked into what really was one of the most frightening experiences of my life. There were literally kids fighting in front of me. I walked by the loo's and the doors where falling off the cubicles. There was human excrement on the bowls and the whole place was just falling apart. There was no discipline, there was massive absenteeism and it was only a 2% preferred choice of school by parents for that catchment area.

Anyway ABA get commissioned by Oasis, our client, to go in and do our stuff together with them and the leadership team. ‘Our Stuff’ is about educational change, leadership, curriculum and of course investing a substantial amount of money into refurbishing parts of the school.

Months pass – a lot of work, and then you go back to an open day. And you see the difference. It is so staggering. It is unbelievable. There’s a sense of discipline, of order, of joy, of empowerment, of creativity.

It’s just phenomenal and I will never forget this one little girl, she was fabulous, a West Indian girl who’d written a poem. It was called ‘The Circle of Inclusion’, which is the Oasis symbol and she ended up in this poem, eulogizing, about all that had happened to her and in the end she said "It’s all summed up in one thing, ‘The Circle of Inclusion’." At which point, I just about broke down because you suddenly realize that you created a symbol that the children are now using as a metaphor for a change in their life - and that symbol had helped them realize what change could be.

It was just a very profound moment, a very humbling moment.