The practice has since won an unprecedented 19 RIBA Awards, and has considerable experience in the arts, education, housing, health, public and community use and masterplanning.
From its offices in Edinburgh, with a staff of 16 people, the practice has been involved in projects across the UK and Ireland Europe and Sri Lanka.
Richard says, “We defined our goals as to make architecture equally of its place and of its time. The selection of projects that we have tackled illustrates that approach looking equally at careful contextual responses to designing within and adjacent to existing buildings and also constructing new buildings within the contexts of established landscape and urban patterns.
I believe that one of the reasons for our success is that we do not specialise. I am interested in tackling any type of building.
“However, in Fife, we won a contract for a low security residential dementia unit in the grounds of NHS Fife Stratheden Hospital. The accommodation consists of 18 single bedrooms with en-suite shower rooms and associated accommodation both for patients and staff. The building is single storey with a
U-shaped plan. Bedrooms are split into the two wings and the communal facilities located centrally. The whole building focuses on a south facing secure garden for patients with the southern edge of the garden walled and framing the view south towards Walton Hill and White Hill. Because of the success of this project, the Practice was awarded a second one, a 24-bed low security dementia and mental health unit on the same grounds.”
Another project, but a very different one, was a housing project in Harlow, Essex. Richard explains, “We were invited by Newhall Projects, a private development company, to contribute to an already developing site. This site is of great interest since it is one of the few examples of a suburban housing development with a strong architectural agenda.”
Suburban roads, already laid out in the master plan have been strengthened by the idea of becoming walled lanes with housing generally at right angles to the road with first floor window supervision of each street. There are four house types: a ‘townhouse’ along the southern and northern boundaries of the site, two single aspect suburban garden houses which occupy the majority of the site and finally a
two-bedroom mews flat at first floor which has a terrace but no garden, sitting on top of garages for adjacent houses. A completely different project was in Sri Lanka, where the practice won a limited competition for the design of a new British High Commission in the Sri Lankan capital of Colombo. Here, Richard says, “We tried to look at air conditioning without using air-conditioning! It was a single storey design arranged around a series of small and intimate courtyards with the starting point of the design being the possibility of empowering the office workers to switch off the air conditioning, open windows to the courtyards and induce a breeze through their offices through a thermal chimney operating down the middle of each ‘leg’ of the design. We were nominated for the Lubetkin Prize, courtesy of the RIBA in 2009.”
For further information please telephone 0131 220 6125 or visit www.richardmurphyarchitects.com.
