Jim Stephenson’s video exploration of our riverside addition to St Hilda’s College in Oxford has been published on Dezeen. This significant and transformative development has created an intuitive spatial coherence with its existing landscape.

The Anniversary Building defines the college boundary, connecting the north and south sides for the first time in St Hilda’s 129-year history. The accompanying Riverside Pavilion provides a versatile space for events and lectures.

Dr. Georgina Paul, Acting Principal, St Hilda’s College says, “As a project, it’s given us enormous confidence as an institution, we suddenly feel we are living in architecture which accords with our vision of ourselves”.

Watch the video here.

To start the year, we are pleased to announce that The Rock has won Best Private House in the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2022.

The Rock is an exemplary new-build family home perched upon a distinctive rocky outcrop at the foothills of Whistler Mountain and at the edge of Alta Lake.

The Wallpaper* Design Awards celebrate innovative and thought-provoking design, and this year was judged by renowned names such as Simone Rocha, Sou Fujimoto and Doug Aitken.

Designer Simone Rocha said of the nominees that she “loved that everything nominated felt very unexpected” and “the things I enjoyed were all set within nature and the landscape”.

We are delighted that Waltham Forest Town Hall transformation project has been shortlisted for the AJ Retrofit Awards in the category Listed Building £5M and over.

As part of our appointment as the civic building architects for the Town Hall Campus Masterplan, Gort Scott redesigned the Council workspace up to RIBA Stage 2 to holistically rethink the existing Town Hall and its relationship to a new Civic Building within the process of transformation of ways of working and delivering council services from a consolidated Town Hall Campus. We defined the brief, outline design, strategies and funding required for the redevelopment of their Grade 2 listed Town Hall, to suit the Council’s changing needs and objectives, including accommodating flexible working patterns.

Hawkins\Brown was appointed to develop the design in the later stages and deliver the project, further to their earlier successful refurbishment of Hackney Town Hall.

The AJ Retrofit Awards celebrate the design expertise behind the vital renewal and repurposing of existing buildings, slashing the industry’s carbon footprint in the process.
The winners will be announced in February 2022.

A few copies of RIBA Journal and Architects’ Journal have just landed on our desk - they include great features on St Hilda’s Oxford. We are delighted to see that the College tower, photographed by Peter Cook, made it to the cover of the RIBA J’s December issue.

‘Gort Scott’s proposal was chosen for the ‘intuitive and natural’ way in which buildings are integrated into the organic complex. And that’s the real strength of the completed scheme: the twisting and tapering Anniversary Building bridges between ranges at either end to make a firm, continuous boundary to the street, and pulls back enough on the river side to open long uninterrupted views through the campus.’
Chris Foges - RIBA J

As part of our series of seminars led by the Environmental Action Group, Sweco shared an in-depth look at embodied and whole life carbon. The embodied carbon of a building is currently responsible for around half of its whole life carbon emissions and is still largely unregulated.

Matthew Mapp set out an introduction to current industry best practice, leading with a review of the LETI Embodied Carbon Target Alignment. He went on to outline the key studies and design decisions taken on our latest project, Gateway West – a commercial building for Stanhope in White City - to reduce the embodied carbon associated with the superstructure and facades. Gateway West is one of the first in a series of built projects where we have worked closely with a Sustainability Specialist to calculate and significantly reduce the buildings’ embodied carbon emissions.

Sweco concluded by outlining the necessity for re-use and retrofit in the built environment. Choosing to adapt and intelligently re-purpose an existing building is one of the most significant project decisions we can make to minimise embodied emissions. Where a brief or site unequivocally precludes retrofit, we will be looking to design-in flexibility from the outset - to support longevity and alternative future uses.

As signatories of Architects Declare, Gort Scott attended the recent launch of the Practice Guide 2021 and are taking steps to implement this within the practice. With an overarching goal to share knowledge and experience openly within the industry, the guide sets out a roadmap for practices to improve their own operations as a business as well as their environmental impact on all projects. It sets guidance for best practice industry standards and outlines essential regenerative design strategies based on, and expanding upon, the RIBA Sustainable Outcomes.

Gort Scott are working actively to reduce our impact on global heating through careful collaboration, research, and advocacy work. We very much support the inclusion of a new declaration point on climate justice and hope to look at ways in which we as a practice can strive to ensure equity and improved quality of life for all.

The mixed-use and residential scheme designed for Hadley Property Group in Merton has been granted planning permission. Station Road development will deliver a total of 116 new homes, of which 44% are affordable, flexible commercial space and a riverside public realm.

At its heart, the development will create a new public riverside park that enjoys South and West sunlight and isanimated by the activity from a café, innovative workspace units, and residential entrances. It will be connected to the chain of riverside routes and spaces with a new pedestrian bridge.

Hadley has pledged its commitment to building a quality scheme, providing greater access to the river, new connections, and ground floor uses which will serve the wider community and local businesses ensuring a lively addition to Colliers Wood.

The concrete frame of our new workspace project, Gateway West, has been completed. Topping out was celebrated in enjoyable fashion on the roof of Allies and Morrison’s adjacent Gateway Central building. The joint ceremony was led by construction manager Sir Robert McAlpine with developer Stanhope and investors Mitsui Fudosan and AIMCo.

The frame supports our shared sustainable agenda for the project. It will be exposed internally to maximise space and light and to moderate internal temperature, while embodied carbon is lowered by a healthy proportion of Ground Granulated Blast-furnace Slag (GGBS) in the mix: up to 50% in the superstructure and 70% in the substructure.

Commencing in September 2020, the works are expected to complete in summer 2022.

As our own response to COP26, Gort Scott’s Environmental Action Group hosted the first in a new series of seminars, to reinforce our practice-wide strategy to address the climate and biodiversity emergency. Our first talk focused on clear understanding of complex and evolving environmental policies, measures and targets – and how we expect to achieve them with our new tools, resources and review processes.

Later in the month we will be collaborating with SWECO to take a more in depth look at the assessment and reduction of embodied carbon in our buildings. This will be followed by a seminar on bio-based materials led by ARUP who will be presenting their research on ‘Circular Based Construction in the North of England.’

The series will conclude with a seminar on sustainable design, led by Certified Passivhaus Designers Jonathan Mann and Paul Wild. As part of an ongoing push to share knowledge within the practice, this will aim to outline practical solutions to design and build very low energy buildings that minimise our impact on global heating.

Constantly reviewing our sustainability goals and increasing technical knowledge internally, with clients and the profession is a key focus for Gort Scot and critical on our journey to reducing the carbon impact of the industry as well as becoming a net zero carbon business.

Following the feature in Architecture Today, the podcast about The Rock is now online. The Rock is a private residence designed by Gort Scott on a rocky outcrop in Whistler, Canada.

Jay Gort discussed the project with Matthew Barac, architect and academic and Isabel Allen, Editor of Architecture Today.

“The whole idea of movement through the building was very carefully choreographed – how you could make that journey to the top and capture some of the essence of climbing up the rock. But we were very conscious of it not becoming just about the journey but about dwelling and stopping. The series of interconnected spaces is like a collage. Where you’re in one of those spaces, you feel grounded by the relationship to the landscape.”

Gort Scott’s design for St Hilda’s College is winner of the Oxford Preservation Trust (OPT) New Building Award, announced during a ceremony that took place this week at St John’s College. The OPT Awards celebrate the contribution that buildings and landscape projects make to Oxford’s character, streets, and green spaces.

Originally won through an invited design competition run by Malcolm Reading Consultants in 2016, the project helped St Hilda’s College realise their vision of creating a new point of arrival and a stronger relationship with the river and the city beyond. Embodying the College values of inclusivity and belonging, the masterplan served to integrate the new buildings into both the urban fabric, natural ecology, and the rich history of Oxford.

The Rev Prof William Whyte, Chairman of the Awards Panel said: ‘This year proved to be extraordinarily rich in projects. Taken together, the judges viewed something like 60 entries: all of them interesting, many of enormous merit, and some of exceptional quality. As we review the winners, we can confidently celebrate the continued commitment of so many people to the preservation and improvement of Oxford’s environment.’

We are excited to have Henry Muss, founder of The Climate Resilience Company supporting Gort Scott with our environmental strategy and becoming a net zero carbon business. We are also starting our B-Corp assessment, working towards accreditation given to businesses that meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose.

With our involvement at Old Oak Common, Andrew and Sarah from our team were invited by Old Oak and Park Royal Development Corporation (OPDC) to run a series of placemaking workshops as part of a staff day at OPDC’s Brent Civic Centre offices. Our sessions complemented workshops by urban economist Richard Brown and Lisa Taylor, Founder of Coherent Cities and Executive Director of Future of London, covering a range of topics focusing on the future of cities including post-pandemic resilience, social and socioeconomic equity and environmental sustainability.

The day was a great success, involving staff from the whole organisation including CEO David Lunts and Chair of the Board Liz Peace CBE.

Our director Fiona Scott will be participating as a mentor for the RIBA’s upcoming Guerrilla Tactics Speed Mentoring event. The sessions will be hosted online on Friday 12 November. Fiona will be offering inspiration, guidance, and career advice to small practitioners as one of 25 mentors.

The event will follow on from Guerrilla Tactics: Stop, Collaborate and Listen and consist of 3 rounds of 20-minute advice on business and professional development needs.

Fiona is one of the Mayor’s Design Advocates, working with City Hall to help support London’s evolution.

Gateway West, our new commercial building for Stanhope, is beginning to take shape, with construction well underway on site.

Gateway West is one of three new buildings being built on the Gateway Site in White City Place, completing a 6.8ha grouping of technology, media and education enterprises in the rapidly developing fin-tech and creative environment of the White City Opportunity Area.

The design has been planned to obtain a BREEAM Excellent rating and makes use of passive design principles to work towards a truly sustainable place of work.