David Taylor: Hi Ken! How are you?

Ken Shuttleworth: I’m great! How are you doing?

DT: Yeah, I’m okay. Adjusting to this world; bit flustered now and again – how about you?

KS: Pretty good; I think we’ve adjusted pretty well - we’ve got 168 people working around the world – from their kitchens…! (laughs)

DT: How are you managing that?

KS: To be honest it’s not gone as bad as you think things are going to go. But it’s exhausting – I mean I’m on video conferences for most of the day. The only thing is, you never know when to interrupt and when it’s your turn to talk. Some of the guys have got 30 people on the line on some of these big projects and it takes all day to do something that I think would be much easier to do face to face. But we’re sort of okay.

DT: I miss the buffer zone you have between travelling; am even starting to cherish the commute because that’s the time when you can rearrange your thoughts and sit and write. Now it feels bufferless, and your Outlook calendar feels a bit brutal.

KS: It is, yeah. 

DT: How about you and exercise?

KS: We haven’t left the garden! Luckily we have five acres so we’re cycling and running round the garden. We haven’t been out on the roads at all. I took the car round the garden and across the field! I thought if I took it out on the road I might have an accident and end up in hospital, so drove it across the field

DT: Is it a 4x4 job?

KS: No, no, it’s an ordinary car. It’s a nice car but you wouldn’t associate it with going across a ploughed field! (laughs). I remember when I was younger, my dad used to have a car back in the 50s and he’d never take it out in winter. So it used to stay in the garage all winter with a blanket over it and he used to have to go and move the wheels around a quarter, I think, every week. Because they’d go flat. It’s the same with an escalator – if you leave an escalator a month the wheels flatten out because of the dead weight. So you have to keep running them. So I’ve been moving my car a little bit, backwards and forwards every week. But in general it’s llke being on holiday, only with constant, constant interruptions and phone calls, and trying to get the Wi-Fi working and charging your phone, and the house has never really been set up to work from. (Ken’s son) Jack’s working as well – he’s 10 – so we’ve got home schooling for him from Google Classroom and then we’ve got tutors online with him as well. He’s got Claire’s computer and a massivescreen right next to me, so every time he’s on I have to go and hide somewhere else with my computer! (laughs)

DT: But overall are you grasping the positives of that and of being close to the family?

KS: Yeah, we’re doing a great job I think. We’re really enjoying spending time together and doing all the jobs we have had on the list since we got married, like clearing the garden and doing the shed. All that sort of stuff. Jack’s loving it. He doesn’t care at all. He prefers school here than he does at school. He’d be completely happy if nothing changed now.

DT: So, a few questions about the practice. You’ve been collaborating on this thing with the visors. Did you wake up one morning and think: ‘I’ve got to do something’?

KS: We were looking at things we could do. I think somebody on Twitter was doing it so we thought we’d have a go. We actually abandoned the studio three weeks ago but sent the models guys back in to take the 3d printers out and take them all home. There’s a pattern you can get from a website to contribute to the NHS so we’ve been making them – I know Foster’s have and BIG have and it’s become a thing architects do. I think we were one of the first to do it but it’s great. At least we’re able to do something positive. 

DT: Your machines are called Ultimakers, aren’t they? 

KS: Yeah, we have 10 or 12. Paul Miles has been masterminding it

DT: Did it make you think what else architects could or should be doing in this ‘fight’, as it were?

KS: Yeah, we’ve thought a lot about it. The problem is, the best thing you can do is not go out. And that’s the most difficult thing with us because we just want to go out and do things.  But as a profession I think it’s great that BDP picked up the work for the Nightingale hospitals – they are the experts on that and they do a lot of field hospitals for the army. So they did that and did a fantastic job. I don’t know what else we can do. I’d love to be able to do more.

DT: In terms of thinking about cities, have you started to assemble any thoughts about how your projects can change at a masterplanning level, or at a building level?

KS: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of thought on that. I think there are two major routes. One is that we’ll all go back to where we were before and nothing will change. That sort of comes after 9/11 – I remember the day after that we looked at towers with more staircases, chutes; we looked at all sorts of things and none of the developers were interested. It was the same after Grenfell in a way – you know, trying to get a second staircase in in some cases was quite difficult. I think the other school of thought which I think is more interesting is that we will change. I think we as a society think about that - especially when designing flats and things that people need space, and bigger balconies, more access to parks. (Designing) within apartments somewhere to have an office/film studio that people don’t normally have, for homeworking. Because I think it will become more normal. People will want to work from home a bit more and it will become more normal, but we will need much better IT. People are relying on home WiFi and the quality of that - all that will change. The way offices will work I think there will be more cellular and people will not want to be open plan, and restaurants will have seating at wider intervals than they are at the moment. People will want more distance. 

DT: So anti-density, in other words?

KS: Yeah and I think the whole globalisation thing is really interesting as well. Because at the moment we are totally reliant from stuff from all over the world to build anything. So we can send our contractors back to site but they haven’t got any materials – it’s coming from Italy where it’s closed down or from China where it’s closed down. There’s hardly anything built in the UK to actually put a project together. I think that might change because it’s become a service country and the idea of making things has been pushed out. 

DT: So more ‘makers’ in other words, in the UK.

KS: Yeah, I think so. We tried to buy more computers. They were on a month’s delivery, two months delivery and they’re probably coming from China. What can you do? You have to keep buying this stuff. But I hope things do change. In a way, society has become much more friendly, much more sociable in terms of looking after neighbours, you know, looking out for people and worrying about the important things in life rather than the stuff we normally argue about. I think that would be a really good societal change.

DT: You’ve just won the project to design the new building to replace the former ITV building on the South Bank. That’s all going ahead 100%? The client hasn’t said anything since lockdown?

KS: No, all the projects that are on the ‘drawing board’ - ie before site – every single one has kept going. It’s just been operating on a delayed basis. All the ones on site pretty much stopped. In fact they all stopped. Even with days to go to completion they all stopped. 

DT: In the UK or across the world?

KS: No, the Sydney ones carried on. There’s stuff in Hong Kong and we’ve got another on site in Shanghai and another one just about to start on site in Hong Kong. In the UK they’ve actually started on 40 Leadenhall but they’ve only put one piling rig up for the 10 they normally have.

DT: So it’s delayed. It’s a freeze.

KS: Yes, it’s ongoing but the end date is going to slip I should think. It’s great if you’re in the middle of a field but social distancing on a site in central London, it’s difficult; even if you go onsite you have a finger print control to get on in the first place. When that doesn’t work it’s really difficult.

DT: So, one final question – a light-hearted one. What is the first thing that you will do when the lockdown lifts?

KS: (laughs) Probably go to dinner – I dunno, some expensive restaurant somewhere (laughs). We’d go back to London from Wiltshire for that, and the London house is sitting there empty. You need to go and flush the toilets and make sure the heating is going to kick in. When we left we set the heating to come back on in October.  We took the pessimistic view of how long we’d be here.

DT: What’s your view now?

KS: It doesn’t look any better, does it? I think they’re telling us three months but all the doctors I’ve been speaking to have been saying six months. We locked down a week early. It’s the right thing to do, to stay put and try to make it work, business-wise. We’ve furloughed a handful but kept everyone on at the moment and there’s still work, and money coming in so we’re okay. I just feel so privileged to be here and am so glad I made the decision 20 years ago to do this (build a house in Wiltshire). It’s not just the guys in the east end of London who I feel sorry for, it’s all those guys in the Third World living in the streets of Mumbai and townships of South Africa. It’s just unthinkable, isn’t it? It really makes you think how lucky we are.