About Us

99 Southwark Street,
London, SE1 0JF
United Kingdom

T: 020 7633 0000

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To tell the stories of everyday life, architecture must be generous enough to accommodate the full range of possibilities. Patterns of life, work, and leisure can change very quickly. Our work demonstrates an approach that is contextual yet visionary, appropriate yet inspired. Our built portfolio demonstrates an ability to design buildings that fulfill clients’ immediate needs, but also provide enough flexibility to grow and evolve.

Our work is underpinned by a rigorous process that balances context, constraints, and concepts. Once we have fully understood the constraints and potential inherent in a project, we begin to develop a concept – a visionary response to what the building needs to be, and a creative point of departure from which a design can spring.

Our approach is to pare away all that is unnecessary in a building, to celebrate simple, honest aesthetic.

We are adept at managing time, budget, and stakeholders in a way that allows for creativity and inspiration. We invest significant time and resources to build trust and understanding with clients and stakeholders. Helping our clients navigate the complexities of the decision-making process by providing guidance and advice is a crucial part of project success. We enthuse and motivate both stakeholders and the design team to ensure that we help champion and deliver the project and retain the conceptual thinking with which it began.

Much of our work is underpinned by ongoing research and development. This critical approach is fundamental to the way we work. From the properties and appropriateness of materials to evolving urban typologies, research roots our practice in a wider context and helps inform the criteria for successful architecture.

Amazing Spaces
With every project we look to transcend the requirements of the brief, adapting or creating spaces that can be used in imaginative ways to excite those who use or visit the building. Whatever their original use may have been, history suggests that we preserve and reimagine amazing spaces for future use, finding new ways to inhabit them. Those well-designed spaces that we first encounter when we enter a building can add value by enhancing its position in the city and creating opportunities for others to be drawn in and engage. Beautiful, flexible spaces in which good things happen.

Designing at Scale
A new piece of city-making can become almost anything. When designing at scale, we begin by assessing the existing urban fabric – built, social, economic – to consider what we could design here that would have the most resonance for the people who will use it, and create lasting value. Designing at scale is all about reconciling the ‘what is’ with the ‘what if’.

We evaluate city living, both now and in the future, to define an appropriate mix of uses for working, living, visiting, and family life, supporting all the activities in which people might participate. Our ambition is to create an integrated mix of uses that keeps a city lively, engaging, holistic, and spontaneous.

Existing buildings
Good design drives sustainable cities because we keep and extend the life of those buildings that we love and which continue to work for us. BAA has a particular expertise in the intelligent refurbishment, extension, and reworking of existing buildings. Our buildings are respectful of their site, surroundings, and historic conditions. We diagnose the existing strengths and weaknesses of buildings to fully unlock their potential, rationalising circulation, entrances, or social spaces to add both experiential and commercial value.