About Us - Enabling
Responding to new conditions
Regardless of scale, a construction project amounts to a client or promoter having an idea and building it. It is, in many ways a process that has not changed since the great boom in development of the Victorian era. But it is also a process which in one aspect has changed fundamentally and that is in relation to the quantity and sophistication of the approvals and compliance process. There is now a major amount of work to be done between the forming of the idea and the need for a full design team involvement. We think of this as Enabling.
The 20th century saw a great expansion in the number and complexity of regulations and approvals, an expansion which took on exponential form at the turn of the 20th/21st centuries. Aspirations have grown and with them regulations. Towards the end of the 20th century the pressures on resources and energy and concerns for the ability of our planet to continue to sustain us in the long term have become another factor for a development to overcome.
Now the compliance requirements on a project are so onerous and wide ranging that the brief cannot be properly defined until much of the compliance work has been carried out. Attempting to deal with the compliance process on a major project by starting with a full design team is neither viable nor sensible any more.
We think this stage of a project can be dealt with in a different way with a small team of very experienced practitioners so that costs can be kept to a sensible minimum and changes in direction can be made without the burden of a large team. This is where enabling comes to the fore. It maintains the client’s important role of initiating the idea and driving it forward but avoids a whole design team becoming bogged down in the minutiae of compliance and approvals. In doing so, plans can be made to avoid or mitigate those hazards on which the client is not prepared to take a risk (or to which it would not be sensible for them to be exposed).
Enabling ‘activities’
- Urban Planning and Design
- Design Team Selection and Direction
- Enabling Workshops
- Consultation workshops
Enabling ‘products’
- Strategic Regeneration Frameworks
- Vision and Concept Statements
- Spatial Masterplans
- Development Briefs
- Design Strategies and Frameworks
- Illustrations and montages
- Design and Access Statements
