Peter Coleman, Company Director and Head of Retail at BDP, talks to RLI about the company’s 50 year history and plans moving forward.
In 2011, BDP is celebrating its 50th anniversary and, with succession planning through three generations, has successfully completed major retail projects through each of these five decades.
BDP, the foremost interdisciplinary architectural and design practice in Europe, currently operates in more than 30 countries around the world. The company has offices in Europe, the Middle East and Asia and has recently worked on retail schemes in Southern and Eastern Europe, India, China, Australia, and the UK.
In 1961 Professor Sir George Grenfell Baines, the founder of Building Design Partnership, now simply BDP, established a new way of practising architecture; as an interdisciplinary design practice – architects, engineers, interior designers and landscape architects working together under one roof, sharing in the design of buildings and places. While this method met with great opposition at the time, through today’s acceptance of co-located teams, it has now been emulated around the world.
Peter Coleman, Head of Retail at BDP, said: “British design and engineering is amongst the best in the world. Our multi-sector portfolio of work allows for a cross-fertilization of ideas and concepts, furthermore our multidisciplinary structure creates opportunities for in house collaboration. Our collaborative multi-sector approach has always been key to our ethos and our success.”
After 50 years at the forefront of retail design, BDP are well placed to comment on the changing faces of retail architecture. Coleman believes the 1960s and 1970s saw the creation and growth of the enclosed shopping centres and the town centre precinct, illustrated by BDP projects such as Blackburn Town Centre and the Brunel Centre, Swindon respectively. The 1980s saw some early reactions against enclosed shopping with a wish for more urban shopping such as The Lanes, Carlisle – designed as simple covered streets. The 1990s saw the growth of the out-of-town mall, such as The Mall at Cribbs Causeway in Bristol. For BDP this decade also brought about the growth of overseas retail projects, such as Via Catarina, Porto and Vasco de Gama, an award-winning regeneration scheme in Lisbon, Portugal, completed for the 1998 expo.
The 2000s saw a return to the city centre through the ‘urban agenda’. New Cathedral Street in Manchester was one of the first wave of retail-led urban regeneration projects and demonstrated how a city could re-invent itself and ‘recover’ after the tragic IRA bombing of 1996. This project also provided the seeds for subsequent urban led regeneration schemes such as Victoria Square, Belfast, and Liverpool One.
Finally, the 2010s and present day have seen us addressing the ‘new world of retail’ with two different trends emerging; the first relating to existing assets, where these are being re-examined to add value with refurbishment and extensions being explored in the established markets of the UK and Europe. Secondly, the trend in emerging markets like China, is for large scale retail and leisure developments, with a strong emphasis on the leisure element. Both these trends bring different sets of challenges for architects and designers.
Coleman said: “Over the decades it has become increasingly important for shopping centres to be considered as ‘destinations’, providing both a good retail offer and a variety of experience to draw people, and keep them coming back. This has never been more important than in today’s technological world where shopping places have to compete with a myriad of virtual shopping opportunities.
A recent example of a BDP scheme including a major leisure element is Forum Istanbul in Turkey. Designed for Multi Development, this is a 120,000 sqm retail and leisure development is also anchored by an 8,000 sqm aquarium – the first aquarium in Europe to be located inside a shopping centre. The project recently won the International Retail and Leisure Destination of the Year Award at Global RLI Awards 2011.
www.bdp.com
For the full article, please see the September 2011 issue.
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