David Taylor caught up with Tom Alexander, Director at Aukett Swanke, to get his thoughts on these times.

David Taylor: Hi Tom – how are you and how are you coping with ‘the obvious’?

Tom Alexander: Good, yeah. It’s really extraordinary. I mean, hearts go out to the people who are having to work through this outside of their home in a way, and to look after us all. They’re an incredible bunch of people, and brave. I was in the post office just the other day picking up a parcel and I said to the guy: “thanks a lot” – we happen to be doing some work with them anyway, the Royal Mail. He said: “you know what? We’re very happy to do it – it’s tough, though”. There are obviously concerns; working from home is kind of easy if you’ve got a room - but there are a lot of other considerations… 

DT: …including family, presumably?  

TA: I’ve got a list actually…I would start with the most important thing when you’re trying to work from home: it’s fresh air and movement. You’ve got your one (piece of exercise) a day that you’re allowed, so make the most of it. Personally, I get up pretty early for a run for an hour or something and that just sorts the day out, really. You can clear your head, think about what you’re doing and move all those joints and muscles and come back with a few endorphins going around. 

DT: Exactly the same with my morning running along the cliffs in Brighton. Whereabouts are you?

TA: I’m in north west London, so don’t have the sea…

DT: Where do you go? Regent’s Park?

TA: If I’m doing a long run, I can go down to the canal at Paddington Basin. But the canal towpaths are quite narrow, so actually it’s harder to be 2 m away from people. So what I’ve found now is I go around the back streets of where we live, which is just near Gladstone Park; it’s very hilly. And the streets are empty! So you can run down the middle of the white lines. It’s brilliant! 

DT: Have you noticed the etiquette changing with running and pedestrians walking the other direction? There’s that weird ‘you’re going to plague me’ look about them…

TA: Yeah, absolutely, so I just run right down the middle of the road and if a car comes that’s the unusual thing. I’m doing this on little roads around a park so it’s not a main road. There’s virtually nobody there and it’s seven in the morning. You start playing games with Strava…

DT: What, drawing pictures?

TA: Yes, exactly. I’m a member of a running club, the Queen’s Park Harriers, and we all go out and we’re all trying to make patterns. There are a few people who are brilliant at it, so as an architect it’s fascinating because you’re drawing on the surface of the city.

DT: How funny – which is essentially what you’re doing at macro scale anyway. What have you drawn so far?

TA: I’ve tried to spell things, which is hard because you get the scale wrong. You think you’ve done an ‘O’ or a ‘T’ or something and actually you’ve done a squidge. So you have to go up a scale, a lot, and go 150m for the main vertical line of the ‘T’ and 60-70m for the crossbar. 

DT: So, what are you working on at the moment?

TA: Everything that we were working on before. As a practice we’ve been going since 1906 and have got this huge legacy of work. We’re doing a whole range of projects now, and and I’m doing a lot of the work that our R&D has generated, which is hybrid stuff. So: a mixture of industrial with residential, or industrial with office, or industrial with hotel, or industrial with more industrial actually, so multi-level. That is very focused on London at the moment. I gave a talk at the NLA just before Christmas and there has been a lot of interest, so we’ve been looking at a lot of sites north, south, east and west as well as central London, with a variety of owners. So some small ones – individual landowners or people who own lots of sites like a Travis Perkins but also with larger developers and housebuilders. We’ve been doing that a lot with a kind of no compromise approach to both industrial and residential, and then we blend it all together with public realm. So that’s definitely keeping me very busy. 

DT: Has anything changed in the mindset on any of those projects, just over the happenings of the last couple of weeks?

TA: I think that’s a good question. It’s a question for all building typologies and cities, indeed, at the moment. And I don’t know whether we’re going to get asked them too early, too soon, if you like, because we don’t really know the full impact of this. But you could start imagining all sorts of scenarios for the city. I think certainly the key one is probably that we are going to find out that we are much more flexible, hopefully; something that we’ve all been trying to do for a long time. And many people have done it very successfully. There’s a company in America called Invision and they have 600 employees and they are all remote – they do very innovative creative advertising. So for a company of 100 people all to be working remotely is fascinating and I think questions are all like: what’s going to happen to the office building? We’ve been looking at that for years anyway with something called the Chassis, which I led and presented at another NLA event and which is really around a variety of spaces and elastic adjacencies. You need to work in different environments during your day anyway, whether that’s an office and would usually be a café, maybe, or someone else’s office or a bit of home working as well. That’s all got a lot more flexible. I’ve been promoting the idea of walking meetings anyway, so you might walk for a meeting with a group of you – usually two or three. It doesn’t work for a huge one because you can’t all hear each other. 

Do we have to change the way the office is designed a bit, or is there just less of it? I remember about 15 years ago when there was a discussion about the death of distance, and technology meant that everybody could work at home. And, therefore, people thought there would be a big brain drain and everyone would leave the city and nobody would work in London and it would be empty and what do you do with the office buildings? It never happened, because everybody likes to meet and talk and see each other. So what we’re doing now with tech is just seeing each other on a screen. And again, we’ve got an international side to us so I’ve been travelling for years. I’ve had meetings with people in various parts of the world where at the end of it they’ll say, on a video screen, “really good to meet you”. And you haven’t! You know, you’ve been talking on a screen. But if the tech is seamless you carry on doing it and you can see the nuances in people’s faces; it works really, really well. So: I think we’re all going to come out of this with a more relaxed approach to how and where and when we work. And I think that’s a really good thing and what we probably all needed anyway. The rigour of the office building – 4m floor to floor, stacked one on top of the other, a bit like a factory, if you like, of production – is perhaps less needed. We’ve been saying that for ages anyway and our chassis building is all about using 8m floor to floor so that you can do what you want to if you have a volume to play with. That meant it might be an office, or it might be a hotel, or it might be something you drop in, like pre-fabs. And it meant that the building is ultimately flexible. You don’t have to think: ‘this is an office building’, but ‘this is a structure that the city needs, and will need, for 100 years’. And you build it for that reason. You don’t build it too bespokely. 

DT: So that’s a pretty positive outlook. In terms of the high street, do you any immediate thoughts about where that is placed, not particularly just retail but as a concept?

TA: Yes, because I do a lot of work with hybrids, mixing industrial and residential, and a large part of industrial is logistics – people ordering stuff from home and then how you get that into their place of work or where they live. That’s been a conversation that’s been going on for quite a while. The high street has been suffering enormously, partly because of that. So If you go up north and to the north east of England you will find high streets that have been really desolate for a long time, actually. In fact, when you do move out of London you often see things have just closed and you wonder how long things are going to last. And you feel for them; it’s dreadful. People are buying more online, but the high street is still – when we can socially have less distance between us – a place where people like to congregate, and I think people still like to go and touch and feel what they’re buying. For the next few months or so or however long, you’re not going to be able to do that, so it’s going to be very tough for the high street. But we are clever at reinventing spaces in cities.

If you look at a lot of the images on social media at the moment the animals are taking over the high street…

DT: The goats – did you see the goats in Llandudno?

TA: Yeah, exactly, and the pheasants in Italy. It’s really interesting to hear birdsong. I heard a woodpecker in my park this morning and I’ve never heard that ever.

DT: I thought precisely that. I was walking along in Brighton, and admittedly Brighton is only 230,000 or so people but it’s still a city and yet acoustically it felt like the country. I think that has a bearing on people’s sleep and stress levels, and all sorts of things. I think there’s wellbeing issues here as well

TA: Yes, absolutely. The scale of the impact we’re not going to quite know at the moment and, well, I can’t imagine the suffering that is going to come for a lot of people and my heart goes out to them. But if there is in future an outcome where there is a kind of correction of some sort with the climate… There have been a lot of tweets and comments around this idea – the lack of pollution over Beijing that we all saw when that was happening weeks and weeks ago, and you look at that and say ‘oh my God! iI’s so quick that it cleared’.  The lack of noise and air pollution over London at the moment is pretty extraordinary. We all supported the London national park approach as well, and that’s just going to become more so over the next few months. And as we go into spring and summer and more things will grow, it will be interesting to see what happens. So – I don’t know what all the outcomes are going to be. But after the pain, perhaps there will be some good things. 

DT: Yes, let’s hope so. Final question ,as my minutes are almost up! What is your business tip for other firms in these times, including and perhaps especially architectural practices?

TA: What I’m doing now, because that is my mindset, is to think entrepreneurially. What are the opportunities? What’s going to start to have problems, and where are the areas that are going to be more realistically required and needed by society? That’s how I got into the idea of redesigning the idea of the office as not a kind of stack building, and also the hybrids – mixing industrial and residential where there was an intensification within a community. And a lot of that is about reducing vehicle movements in those areas. We’re doing one on the river Thames at the moment actually so that means we are going to use boats.   

I think it’s time to explore. Care for your family and your sharers in the first instance. But then, time to explore.