Hawkins\Brown are 28 years old, 250 people strong and a collaborative architectural led practice. Our staff are architects\ designers\ masterplanners\ researchers\ space planners\ interior designers\ collaborators\ makers\ negotiators\ artists\ visualisers\ problem solvers... Our approach to design is responsive. We listen to and understand the problem, and the cultural and social context around it, before developing a solution that fits.

Sponsoring Yair Schwartz, 2013 EngD cohort

Hawkins\Brown has recently started a research project, in collaboration with UCL. We are developing a building performance visualisation toolkit, enabling designers to generate and communicate design recommendations in respect of a range of sustainable questions, focusing on the Whole Life Cycle of buildings.

Bringing existing buildings back into useful life is part of the ethos of Hawkins\Brown’s work; for example Park Hill, South Bank University and Wates House with UCL. The new designs use large parts of the original buildings, leading to major savings in the embodied carbon of the new designs. There is currently no way of proving the optimum balance and benefit of new development versus refurbishment of the existing fabric. Our joint research offers an holistic approach that utilizes the LCA method to aid the decision-making process and enable easy communication with clients, planners and other design team members.

By developing a suite of computational tools which would enable to identify the most effective ways of visual communication of LCA to both lay audience and design teams, Hawkins\Brown hopes that designers will be able to improve the process of decision making, the accuracy of building performance simulations and the clarity of communication between design teams and clients.