Eric Parry Architects Selected Projects

Selected Projects

The Practice

Eric Parry Architects is an established and award-winning practice with a portfolio of notable work. The practice has gathered together talented individuals from diverse cultural backgrounds and a wide range of experience and as a result, the practice operates easily within any frame of reference, whether the Far East or continental Europe.

Eric Parry founded the practice in 1983. It is based in London, and employs over 90 staff. The practice also has an office in Singapore, where we have a number of residential schemes in the region.

Eric Parry maintains a key involvement in all projects, particularly in their design development stages. The practice approaches all work with intellectual rigour, and also seeks to integrate the highest level of craftsmanship in all schemes it undertakes.

The practice is responsible for several highly prestigious commercial projects in the City of London and the West End.

The practice has also completed a number of cultural projects involving highly sensitive historic buildings including a significant new wing for the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath, and are currently working on a new recital hall and associated teaching spaces for Wells Cathedral School.

Eric Parry Architects completed the restoration and renewal project for the historic St Martin-in-the-Fields Church in Trafalgar Square in 2008.

Notable previous work includes the home of the London Stock Exchange at 10 Paternoster Square in the City of London and the acclaimed office buildings at 30 Finsbury Square and 5 Aldermanbury Square.

Eric Parry has developed a strong reputation for delivering beautifully crafted and high-quality contemporary buildings that respond to their context.

His practice, Eric Parry Architects, is renowned for cultural projects involving sensitive historic buildings such as the restoration of the historic St Martin-in-the-Fields Church in Trafalgar Square and the highly acclaimed new extension for the Holburne Museum of Art in Bath.

The practice is known for several prestigious commercial projects in London’s City and West End including 1 Undershaft which will become the tallest building in the City of London crowning the new cluster of planned skyscrapers in the Square Mile.

The practice’s work also include the RIBA Stirling Prize shortlisted schemes at 30 Finsbury Square and 5 Aldermanbury Square. The successful 8 St James’s Square broke a UK office rent record in 2015.

International projects include the residential schemes Damai Suria in Kuala Lumpur and the Westminster Nanpeidai in Tokyo for Grosvenor.

In addition to his work in architectural practice, Eric Parry serves on the Council of the RA, The Fabric Advisory Committee of Canterbury Cathedral and the Council of the British School at Rome.

He has in the past served on the Arts Council of England’s Visual Arts and Architecture panel, the London Mayor’s Design Advisory Panel and chaired the RIBA Awards Group.

His contribution to Academia includes fourteen years as Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Cambridge and lectureships at the Harvard University Graduate Design School, the Tokyo Institute of Technology and was President of the Architectural Association from 2005 - 2007.

Design Approach

“Our contribution is very much one to do with continuity, but in reinterpretation, in the present. (...) There isn’t a style tag. There is much more a concern for a way of crafting, the materiality of these projects, but also their relationship to a specific urban site, whether it is a street, a square, or an urban place of an atypical kind. This is really where the intensity of design discourse happens.”

The aspect of place and context we explore from a theoretical position and knowledge of the tradition of the European city. This is a basis from which we allow our speculation in design (not with repetition or historicism).

The character of a building can be instigated by an individual creative thought or process but is only delivered with a wider team. The client is central to this team and we have nurtured close and collaborative working relationships with them.

We enjoy a range of scales of making – this is from a door handle to an urban masterplan. The design and execution is different for each but all need passion and commitment. We relish the urban milieu with its juxtapositions of scale, activity and real lived intensity.

Design Methodology

Eric Parry leads our creative design process with a team of skilled and enthusiastic architects and assistants. Depending on the scale of the project a senior architect will manage the internal team and the coordination with the broader design team and client.

For a major urban project this would be a director supported by an associate director and associate with teams of architects to focus on various elements of the project.

We are all familiar with the work stages through which a project should smoothly progress. We are accepting of the need for rigor in completing accurately and fully these stages whilst ensuring our intent and flare is concentrated, not diluted.

When the going is less predictable, as can be the case with planning and external influences, we are able to negotiate to best affect a positive outcome.

An example of our working methodology is seen in the process and selected images (opposite) for the 7 & 8 St James’s Square project and the corner elevation treatment on Duke of York Street.

Our testing through drawing and 3D modelling is then continued through to full size mock ups so that quality control of components can be observed.

Here the reference to Lutyens’ own office in No.7 is expressed in the projecting open limestone framework above a monument carving by Stephen Cox (completed in South India).

Client Cambridge Assessment

Value £142m

Status Completed 2018

Cambridge Assessment

We were appointed to design the new headquarters for Cambridge Assessment in 2013, following a limited competition. Established over 150 years ago, Cambridge Assessment operates and manages the University of Cambridge three exam boards and carries out academic and operational research on assessment in education.

The development provides approximately 350,000 sqft (NIA) of new office and amenity space for 3,000 people with 1,150 bicycle spaces. Our vision was to create an inspiring new group of connected buildings, ranging from four to five storeys in height.

These are shallow plan depth fingers set around raised landscaped podia with a central arrival court and garden. The main façades are formed of horizontal bands of handset brickwork in lime mortar, combined with light coloured self-finished precast concrete elements, and include a visual arts intervention by Vong Phaophanit and Claire Oboussier.

A taller tower is located along the railway, marking the site when viewed from the railway and busway approach into Cambridge station. The tower is scaled to the local context and will not compete with the existing taller landmark buildings in Cambridge. The building will be highly sustainable and is targeting a DEC A rating when in occupation.

Client The Masters, Fellows & Scholars of Pembroke College

Value £6.5m

Status Masterplan completed 1989 Foundress Court completed 1998

Pembroke College

History is more of a burden for the inhabitants of one of the oldest university towns in England than is generally acknowledged. Given the college’s unending need for further accommodation and the restriction on site within the densely developed town fabric of Cambridge, the addition of nearly 100 student rooms, a fellow’s set, computer centre, meeting rooms and new Master’s Lodge was a challenge requiring a very comprehensive masterplan.

The complex nature of this building in an urban context between town streets and a collegiate interior is illustrated by the fifteen elevations that make up the exterior. The two perpendicular wings of the building form the new boundaries to one of the college courts.

At the northern end, the building resolves as a raised, cloistered garden; at the western end, the master’s lodge forms the end of the building.

At the intersection of the wings there is a main stair which rises up below the roof lantern. The lantern demarcates the new college entrance. To the street side, six new small courts of different character are formed between projecting pavilions.

The building is formed from in-situ concrete slabs supported on load bearing blockwork walls. The fabric of the building has been developed using some of the most innovative specialists and testing bodies to create a building with an anticipated life of over 200 years.

Opposite Stairwell in student accommodation

Left Façade detail

Overleaf

The buildings viewed from New Court

Peter Blundell Jones, The Architects’ Journal

“All in all, it is a most impressive building, particularly in the careful detailing and choice of materials, and it confirms Parry as a major talent of his generation.”

The Cambridge Science Cluster is world renowned for research and education and makes an excellent base for multinational innovative companies.

Granta Park

The first phase was Granta Park, a development of new R&D labs totally 50,000 sqm in the Green Belt, which meant demonstrating the need for specialised hightech workspace as well as achieving exacting standards of sustainability and design quality.

Working with Latz + Partner, we turned agricultural land into a working environment for science and technology, meeting the standards of research laboratories as well as minimising impact on the environment. It has sustainable traffic, water and sewage systems, as well as series of amenities which foster communal interaction, such as a cricket pitch, restaurant and conference facilities. Its profits went towards The Welding Institute’s own expansion plans.

The creation of Granta Park, a joint development between MEPC and TWI in the 1990s, provided the first opportunity to make a significant investment into the existing building stock of the Welding Institute Facilities and provide much needed modern accommodation.

The original masterplan was started in 1992 with the acquisition of 87 acres of farm land, on which Granta Park Phase 1 is now built with the basic concept of a high quality, low density, fully landscaped development. The masterplan for the park was developed in consideration of ecological criteria, with the aim of preserving and enhancing the existing rural landscape and ensuring the site would be easily accessible.

Throughout the subsequent 15 years the site was transformed from arable farmland to the highly successful science park it is today. With a vision to provide the very best purpose-built research facilities in a high quality landscape setting, Granta Park is recognised as a highly successful science park. After Granta Park successfully generated funds for The Welding Institute’s own development, we moved onto phase 2 of the masterplan in 2011.

The brief was to create extended facilities to the existing Welding Institute, including new catering facilities as well as further office and research spaces.

Granta Park Phase 2

Eric Parry Architects has developed detailed proposals for the Phase 2 development of Granta Park. The core objective of the proposal is to create a landscaped campus with flexible and sustainable life science buildings for office and lab use to meet the demand in this unique and established location in South Cambridgeshire.

The Phase 2 site sits to the east of Phase 1 and directly south of the historic Grade 2 listed Abington Hall and its associated landscape.

The extensive and maturing landscape strategy at the heart of the first phase has been key to the success of the campus and Phase 2 builds on this with wellbeing and nature at the heart of the scheme.

A total of 34,000 sqm of space is provided across five buildings within the shared landscape.

The proposals are bringing forward a highly sustainable strategy with extensive landscaping.

Through the use of high performance facades, passive and active energy saving measures and LZC technologies including Air Source Heat Pumps and Solar PV the development is expected to achieve a 32.7% reduction in regulated carbon emissions using the future carbon factors, of which 18.8% comes from LZC’s. This significantly exceeds the minimum compliance target of 10%.

The development is targeting BREEAM Excellent, WELL Gold standard and Wired score certification.

Anodised aluminium

Twice fired, two coloured glazed ceramic baguettes

Plant Roof

Metal handrail

Anodised aluminium

Twice fired, two coloured glazed ceramic baguettes

Twice fired, two coloured glazed ceramic head profile

Timber framed windows with anodised metal caps

Anodised aluminium sills

Polished pre-cast columns

Polished pre-cast panels

Polished pre-cast soffit panels Partial Elevation

Client The Welding Institute

Value £40m

Status Completed 2016

The Welding Institute

Eric Parry Architects was commissioned to design the Masterplan for Granta Park in the mid 1990s by the then owner MEPC. Throughout the subsequent 16 years the site has been transformed from arable farmland into the highly successful science park it is today.

Following the recent completion of a restructuring of the ownership of Granta Park, The Welding Institute have been able to transform their site and create the accommodation suited to their needs.

Three new buildings house amenity operations, a NSIRC education facility and an engineering hall including heavy and light engineering laboratories and office accommodation.

The project won a RIBA National & East Region Award (2017).

Wilmar Headquarters

Our proposal combines signature architecture with high quality public realm to create a landmark headquarters building for Wilmar International’s global business. Our proposal provides world class laboratories and office spaces within a landscaped garden setting.

The building is organic in form and is characterised by tiered landscape terraces which provide a garden aspect to each office level. The envelope has ribbons of glass to provide 360 degree views whilst horizontal fins provide solar shading to keep the building cool.

The extensive use of reflective materials both mirror and accentuate the surrounding landscape to provide ‘a workspace within the landscape’. An open ground floor provides a large covered public space with active uses of exhibition centre, auditorium and café which animate the space.

A basement car park and cycle store enjoy end of journey cycle facilities of showers and lockers. The building is highly sustainable and responds to climate and orientation to maximise the passive effect on reducing heat load and energy usage. It promotes responsible resource stewardship through conservation of water, rainwater harvesting, an integrated greywater system throughout.

Knowledge Quarter

Our scheme for the British Library Knowledge Quarter provided flexible commercial office and research space with The Alan Turing Institute’s flagship data science lab, alongside the British Library and the Francis Crick Institute, the largest biomedical research facility in Europe.

Focussed around a new public space the design focussed on being a powerful symbol of the British Library values, to develop a clear vision of a society where education, research, public realm and business interact in a mutually beneficial setting.

Great Ormond Street

A colourful, playful entrance to welcome children into a different kind of hospital. Conceived as an arcade with a curated changing exhibition space, displaying artifacts which appeal to children and parents alike.

This complex medical project was a shortlisted competitive dialogue process with Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) to develop phase 4 of their masterplan. GOSH is one of the world’s leading children’s hospitals with the broadest range of dedicated, children’s healthcare specialists under one roof in the UK. The hospital sees more than 268,000 patients every year from across the UK and around the world.

Our design responds to the historically sensitive site and combines a beautifully crafted façade with quality materials and detailing. The base is finely detailed with large arched windows to provide transparency and natural light to the interior.

The arches are designed to give the building the appearance of floating above the street with a lightness that comes to ground at the entrance. The upper portion of the arch has dichroic glass blocks which glint with colour as they reflect the daylight.

We have designed a breathable building, with a façade providing windows able to open and mixed mode ventilation, balconies and terraces. The top of the building offers a large sensory garden. The building will become the new ‘front door’ for the organisation and an architectural expression of its guiding principle: The Child First and Always.

Roof Garden Level 10

School & Teen Centre Level 9

Inpatient Communities Level 4 - 8

Diagnostic Level 3

Technical Facilities For Use By Staff During Procedures

Entrance & Outpatients Level 2

Outpatients Neighborhoods Level 1

Facilities Management Level 0

Plant Level -1

Norfolk & Norwich Hospital

Located at the outskirts of Norwich as an open green field on the threshold between rural and urban communities our proposal for the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital aims to move away from the homogeneity and centralisation of traditional hospital design with its focus on technology in favour of a smart decentralised approach orientated towards the patient, the family (visitor) and community

The hospital is interpreted and organised as part of a town, structured yet differentiated, allowing individual areas to be treated with more freedom, greater respect to the conditions of the lives of the patients and the possibility of future expansion.

In creating a coherent setting of interdependent buildings around a central garden we considered the historic tradition of landscaping and nature as a restorative power of physical and spiritual well being. The therapeutic healing centres of the ancient Greeks at Asklepion of Pergamon or the Medieval Monastery Gardens of Germany (– e.g. Abbey Disibodenberg & Hildegard von Bingen) understood the vital connection between the green health of the natural world and the holistic health of the human being.

The landscape plays a fundamental role in the design of the hospital, the relationship between gardens, and physical and spiritual healing, plants, and medicine, has many historic precedents.

Buildings are arranged towards the edge of the site, focussing inwards to the protective central garden.

At the more civic end next to the urban square, the landscape is characterised by more formal, crisp, and controlled planting, to the south the landscape changes into a cultivated wilderness of an informal woodland where diversity of planting of native species is a priority and the buildings are being carved into the solid mass of the trees.

The central garden is the heart of the scheme, around which smaller differentiated gardens are related to the specific activities such as therapeutic gardens, children’s gardens, herb gardens.

Client City of London Corporation

Status Public Consultation

Salisbury Square

The City of London Corporation has identified a unique opportunity to create modern facilities for both the City of London Police and Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) in the heart of the historic Square Mile.

Eric Parry Architect has been commissioned to design and deliver a new, purpose-built 18-courtroom legal facility called the City of London Law Courts and a cutting-edge police head-quarters equipped to amongst other things combat fraud and economic crime across the UK.

Built to exemplar standards when it comes to accessibility and sustainability, the buildings are designed to last for at least 125 years. Salisbury Square will be enlarged and refocused as a gathering point for the development, somewhere people can enjoy.

The placement of buildings and introduction of new routes has been inspired by the ancient City, with passageways and spaces encouraging con-versation and exchange of information. Eric Parry Architects have prioritised the continuation of this tradition and integrated it into a modern development as a vital part of civic life.

London SW1

Client Quadrum

Status Planning Consent

11 Belgrave Road

A unanimous resolution to grant planning consent was achieved for 11 Belgrave Road at the Westminster City Council’s Planning Committee held on 3 August 2020.

The 2,200 sqm garden designed in collaboration with German landscape architects Latz + Partners is free for the public to access providing unique views of the capital.

The project for Quadrum will renew this tired 1950s office building, with the partial reconstruction, new facades, garden courts and roof terraces providing flexible, contemporary workspace at the heart of Pimlico. A new café and gym/wellness spa will complement the sustainable working environment.

The councillors praised the client’s commitment to consultation with the local community and the quality of the new elevations and urban landscaping.

London NC1

Client Argent Group plc

Value £76m

Status Completed 2017

4 Pancras Square

The Argent development at King’s Cross is one of the most significant new urban developments in London and one that will receive worldwide attention. The site is located to the north of the existing King’s Cross railway station, adjacent to St Pancras International Station on brownfield land.

Eric Parry Architects was commissioned in 2003 to prepare an initial design for 4 Pancras Square to test the Masterplan proposal. At that time the cast iron gasometer was still located on the site of the proposed Pancras Square and this informed the proposal for an expressed steel frame to this office building.

The materials of the façade consist of weathering steel and white glazed ceramic for the horizontal brise soleil shading.

The building consists of 10 storeys of office above ground floor reception and retail with two floors of basement below and was completed in June 2017.

Birmingham

Client Birmingham City Council & Hermes Fund Managers Ltd

Status Completion Due Autumn 2019

1 Chamberlain Square

Eric Parry Architects won a competition in 2014 to design the first building at Paradise. Our proposal at One Chamberlain Square has led to the creation of an exemplar modern commercial building that both reflects and complements the historic civic space in which it is set.

This eight storey, 172,000 sqft office building has retail on the ground floor with office space above. The whole of the commercial space is let to international professional services firm PwC who will move their 1,400 strong team into the building in 2019 to create a new regional headquarters.

Client The Clothworkers’ Company

Status Planning

50 Fenchurch Street

50 Fenchurch Street is an island site bounded by Fenchurch Street, Mincing Lane, Dunster Court, and Mark Lane. The site is owned by The Clothworkers’ Company.

Apart from the medieval Tower of All Hallows Staining and the subterranean Lambe’s Chapel Crypt, all the buildings were built after 1945. These buildings include the Clothworkers’ Hall, Minster House, 46-50 Fenchurch Street, 51-54 Fenchurch Street and St Olave’s Church Hall.

The proposed 50 Fenchurch Street includes two listed buildings, the Grade I listed Tower of All Hallows Staining and the Grade II listed Lambe’s Chapel Crypt. Neither are currently accessible to the public as they are on private land.

50 Fenchurch Street will provide over 62,000 sq m of flexible office space arranged around a central core. Floor plates vary in size’ to maximise the building’s appeal to a range of City occupiers.

The proposed scheme sets the Tower within a new street level public realm, with the aspiration of providing public access to the interior. Lambe’s Chapel Crypt is to be relocated to a publicly accessible location on site, providing the opportunity to improve the Crypt’s presentation, setting and understanding.

London E1

Client Ballymore Properties Limited

Hammerson UK Properties PLC

Status Planning

The Goodsyard Plot 2

The client is a Joint Venture between Hammerson and Ballymore. Eric Parry Architects has been commissioned to develop a building for Plot 2 of The Bishopsgate Goodsyard masterplan to allow a detailed planning application to be submitted as part of an overall outline Planning Masterplan.

Our building at Plot 2 is the flagship commercial building on the western prow of the Goodsyard delivering approximately 47,000 m² NIA office space and retail uses at ground and the Platform level and is integrated into the heritage-rich, partly-listed world of brick archways, the remains of the Bishopsgate Goodsyard Station.

The new building will include 15% affordable office space and 25-30% co-working spaces. (The affordable space may be part of the coworking space).

Rochester Innovation Park

Our competition entry focused on creating a venue that can enhance the vibrancy of the one-north community through a wide range of F&B offerings, a variety of co-work and serviced offices, exquisite hotel rooms and suites of community programs. It spanned an array of properties revoling round an underground auditorium, 'The Oculus' which is set into the hillside.

On the adjacent area of the site sits the 19-storey high rise building, adorned in glazed ceramic fins featuring an integrated sky garden.

Nested within the lush greenery, the proposal integrated sensetively with the existing landscape, saught to improve the connectivity of the space and create a cohesive ecosystem of learning, working and living.

Client Confidential Status Competition

Holland Village

Our design will reconnect the existing Holland Village to the east to Buona Vista and the residential communities to the west through a welcoming porous commercial and residential development.

The material palette follows the traditions of painted masonry, fine finished concrete elements, and a colour palette of dark and white as found in the traditional bungalow architecture of Singapore.

The new Holland Village will be a vibrant landscape focused quarter, that will be a place for the whole community to enjoy during the day and night.

The two taller towers are separated from the base by a generous landscape terrace, which all residents can enjoy. The towers are designed to be like paper lanterns, wrapped in layered translucent glass panels to create a soft light veil to provide shade during the day, and gently glow in the evening.