Company type | Private |
---|---|
Industry | Construction |
Founded | 1976[1] |
Founder | Sir Edmund Happold |
Headquarters | , United Kingdom |
Number of locations | 37 |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | [2] |
Products |
|
Services | engineering consulting, and specialist consulting services |
Revenue | GB£171.9 million (2016/17) [3] GB£160 million (2015/16) [4] |
Number of employees | 3,000 [5] |
Website | www |
Buro Happold Limited (previously BuroHappold Engineering) is a British professional services firm that provides engineering consultancy, design, planning, project management, and consulting services for buildings, infrastructure, and the environment. It was founded in Bath, Somerset, in 1976 by Sir Edmund Happold when he took up a post at the University of Bath as Professor of Architecture and Engineering Design.
Originally working mainly on projects in the Middle East, the firm now operates worldwide and in almost all areas of engineering for the built environment, working in 24 locations around the world.
Edmund (or Ted) Happold worked at Arup before founding Buro Happold, where he worked on projects such as the Sydney Opera House and the Pompidou Centre. Ted Happold was renowned within the field of lightweight and tensile structures. As a result, Buro Happold has undertaken a large number of tensile and other lightweight structures since its founding (including the Millennium Dome). Ted Happold died in 1996, but the firm claims to maintain his views on engineering and life. [6]
Buro Happold was founded on 1 May 1976, with its first office on Gay Street in Bath, United Kingdom. [1] The firm started with eight partners:
The King's Office, Council of Ministers and Majlis Al Shura (KOCOMMAS), Central Government Complex in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia was the firm's first major design project in 1976. [1] Initially, Buro Happold offered only structural engineering consultancy, with a particular strength in lightweight structures, but in 1977 it added civil engineering and geotechnical engineering and in 1978 building services engineering. [1] In 1982 Buro Happold started to work with Future Tents Ltd (FTL) on a variety of temporary and recreational structures. The firms combined their operations in 1992, but split again in 1997.
In 1983, Buro Happold opened an office in Riyadh, and has since opened offices around the UK and internationally: [1]
By 1993, Buro Happold had 130 employees and eight partners. In 1998 this had grown to 300 employees and 12 partners, while in 2000 with over 500 employees the partnership was increased to 23. [1] In 2006 the partnership stood at 25 with over 1,400 employees and 14 offices. Due to this growth and the addition of so many different services, the company was restructured in 2003 to consist of multi-disciplinary teams of engineers, each with structural, mechanical and electrical engineers supported by specialist consulting groups. [1]
In 2005, Buro Happold launched Happold Consulting, a management and overseas development consultancy with expertise in the construction sector, and Happold Media, a subsidiary offering graphic design and media development services.
Significant amongst its specialist consultancy services are its fire consultancy group, FEDRA, and software development group SMART which worked with The University of Sheffield to develop Vulcan software, [7] widely used throughout the fire engineering industry. [8] SMART also develops Buro Happold's in-house software Tensyl, a non-linear finite element analysis and patterning program for fabric structures, and people flow modelling software. [9] Also notable is its group COSA, which undertakes computational modelling and analysis [10] [11] and the Sustainability and Alternative Technologies Group. [12]
In 2007 Buro Happold became a limited liability partnership, and in 2008 appointed 18 new partners. In 2018 the practice appointed an additional 13 partners.
The firm is a limited liability partnership with 87 partners and over 2,500 employees. [13]
In 1973, before the founding of Buro Happold, Edmund Happold, Ian Liddell, Vera Straka, Peter Rice and Michael Dickson established a lightweight structures research laboratory corresponding to Frei Otto's similar research institute at the university of Stuttgart. Ted Happold was the first to introduce ethylenetetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) as a cladding material, and the outcomes of the research carried out by the laboratory led to the development of the designs for the Mannheim Multihall gridshell and a number of landmark fabric structures in the Middle East and the UK, allowing the new building forms to become generally accepted by architects and clients. [9]
Buro Happold's early projects ranged from designing giant fabric umbrellas for Pink Floyd concerts [14] to the Munich Aviary and the Mannheim Multihalle, both with Frei Otto, an architect who repeatedly worked with Buro Happold on projects which pioneered lightweight structures. The Mannheim Multihalle was a timber gridshell of 50 by 50 mm lathes of hemlock of irregular form, depending on the elasticity of spring washers at the joints for its flexible form. It was one of the first major uses of structural gridshells. [9]
Following the development of fabric structures expertise on the projects with Frei Otto, Buro Happold was instrumental in further developing the knowledge and technology of fabric structures. With Bodo Rasch, a protégé of Frei Otto, and drawing on experience from the Pink Floyd canopies, they designed folding, umbrella-like canopies to shade the courtyard of Al-Masjid al-Nabawi (The Mosque of the Prophet) in Medina, Saudi Arabia. [15] [16] [17] They also designed the, at the time, largest fabric canopy in Europe at the Ashford Designer Outlet in the UK. [18]
This development of fabric structures expertise culminated in Buro Happold, with a team led by Ian Liddell, and with Paul Westbury, [19] designing the Millennium Dome, the world's largest fabric roof and the first building of its type. [20] The expertise in wooden gridshell structures has resulted in the design of structures such as the Weald and Downland Museum and the Savill Building in Windsor Great Park. [21] [22]
Buro Happold has also completed the designs of a number of cardboard structures, notably the Japan Pavilion for Expo 2000 in Hanover with Shigeru Ban and Frei Otto, consisting of a gridshell of paper tubes (the structure was reinforced with steel in order to comply with fire regulations, though the tubular structure was itself structurally sufficient). [23] The firm has worked with Shigeru Ban on a number of other projects. Another design in cardboard was the Westborough School cardboard classroom in Westcliff. [24]
Buro Happold is best known for providing engineering services for buildings, but it also undertakes a large proportion of its work in civil, geotechnical and environmental engineering, and an increasing amount of overseas development work.
Buro Happold is part of the consortium appointed by EDAW to design the Olympic Park for the London 2012 Olympics. [56] The team which built the Emirates Stadium, made up of McAlpine, Populous and Buro Happold also designed and constructed the Olympic Stadium. [57] [58] [59]
In 2021, Buro Happold acquired Vanguardia Consulting Ltd, a leading acoustic and audio-visual consultancy firm, to strengthen their offering in these areas. The acquisition included Crowd Dynamics, Vanguardia's sister company. [60]
Buro Happold's most recent awards include: ‘Building performance consultancy (over 1000 employees)’ and the 'Energy Efficient Product or Innovation' Award for NewMass, [61] a phase change chilled beam at the 2018 CIBSE Building Performance Awards.[ citation needed ]
Buro Happold won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture for Tuwaiq Palace in Riyadh in 1998 and again in 2010 for the design of the Wadi Hanifah wetlands. [62] Buro Happold also won the Queen's Award for Enterprise twice, for export achievement and again for sustainable development. In 1999 Buro Happold engineers Ian Liddell, Paul Westbury, Dawood Pandor and technician Gary Dagger won the Royal Academy of Engineering's MacRobert Award for their design of the Millennium Dome – only the second time in the award's history that it has gone to a construction project. [63] Buro Happold received the accompanying gold medal. [20]
In 2007, Buro Happold won the IStructE Supreme Award for the Savill Building in Windsor Great Park. [64]
The Aviva Stadium won the 2011 International Project Award at the British Construction Industry Awards. The Royal Shakespeare Theatre won the Project of the Year Award at the 2011 Building Awards. At the 2010 Structural Awards the John Hope Gateway building won the award for Arts or Entertainment Structures. The Institution of Structural Engineers announced there were to be two winners of its coveted Gold Medal in 2012: Buro Happold's then-CEO Paul Westbury was one of them. Paul was selected for the award due to his innovation in the structural form, and design of sports and entertainment buildings; in particular for his leading contribution to the design and construction of Arsenal's Emirates Stadium in London, the 2006 Olympic Speed Skating Oval in Turin, Dublin's Aviva Stadium and the London 2012 Olympic Stadium. Paul has also very successfully promoted structural engineering internationally through his innovative papers on design and technology.[ citation needed ]
Buro Happold's projects have won three RIBA Stirling Prizes: the Media Centre at Lord's Cricket Ground in 1999, the Magna Science Adventure Centre in Rotherham in 2001 and Burntwood School in 2015. The Library of Birmingham won the public vote for the Stirling Prize in 2014 and the Evelina Children's Hospital won the public vote in 2006. The following Buro Happold projects have been shortlisted for the Stirling Prize:
Sheffield Winter Garden is a large temperate glasshouse located in the city of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England. It is one of the largest temperate glasshouses to be built in the UK during the last hundred years, and the largest urban glasshouse anywhere in Europe. It is home to more than 2,000 plants from all around the world. It was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II on 22 May 2003.
In structural engineering, a tensile structure is a construction of elements carrying only tension and no compression or bending. The term tensile should not be confused with tensegrity, which is a structural form with both tension and compression elements. Tensile structures are the most common type of thin-shell structures.
William Ian Liddell CBE FREng FIStructE Hon FRIBA is a structural engineer and the designer of London's Millennium Dome. He was one of the founding partners of Buro Happold and is a Royal Academy Visiting Professor of Engineering Design at Cambridge University School of Engineering. He is now a consultant for Buro Happold.
Arup is a British multinational professional services firm headquartered in London that provides design, engineering, architecture, planning, and advisory services across every aspect of the built environment. It employs about 17,000 people in over 90 offices across 35 countries, and has participated in projects in over 160 countries.
Frei Paul Otto was a German architect and structural engineer noted for his use of lightweight structures, in particular tensile and membrane structures, including the roof of the Olympic Stadium in Munich for the 1972 Summer Olympics.
Shigeru Ban is a Japanese architect, known for his innovative work with paper, particularly recycled cardboard tubes used to quickly and efficiently house disaster victims. Many of his notable designs are structures which are temporary, prefabricated, or incorporate inexpensive and unconventional materials in innovative ways. He was profiled by Time magazine in their projection of 21st-century innovators in the field of architecture and design.
Schlaich bergermann partner is a nationally and internationally active structural engineering and consulting firm with headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany and branch offices in Berlin, New York City, São Paulo, Shanghai and Paris.
The Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, commonly referred to simply as the Great Court, is the covered central quadrangle of the British Museum in London. It was redeveloped during the late 1990s to a design by Foster and Partners, from a 1970s design by Colin St John Wilson. The court was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in 2000.
Sir Edmund "Ted" Happold was a structural engineer and founder of Buro Happold.
The Weald and Downland Gridshell (2002) is a building designed by Buro Happold and Edward Cullinan Architects for the Weald and Downland Open Air Museum: it was shortlisted for the Stirling Prize in 2002. The building is a structural wooden gridshell, constructed of oak sourced from Normandy, and cladded with local cedar. Before constructing the gridshell, members of Buro Happold and the Cullinan practice-built a prototype during their own time on weekends. This was also a self-supporting gridshell, and was used as a temporary entrance canopy on the Pompidou Centre.
A gridshell is a structure which derives its strength from its double curvature, but is constructed of a grid or lattice.
The Institution of Structural Engineers' Structural Awards have been awarded for the structural design of buildings and infrastructure since 1968. The awards were re-organised in 2006 to include ten categories and the Supreme Award for structural engineering excellence, the highest award a structural project can win.
Michael Geoerge Tufnell Dickson (1944–2018) was a structural engineer and a founding partner of Buro Happold. He was a Visiting Professor of Engineering Design at the University of Bath Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering.
The Savill Building is a visitor centre at the entrance to The Savill Garden in Windsor Great Park, Surrey, England designed by Glen Howells Architects, Buro Happold and Engineers Haskins Robinson Waters. It was opened by the Duke of Edinburgh on 26 June 2006.
The Riverside Museum is a museum in the Yorkhill area of Glasgow, Scotland, housed in a building designed by Zaha Hadid Architects, with its River Clyde frontage at the new Pointhouse Quay. It forms part of the Glasgow Harbour regeneration project. The building opened in June 2011, winning the 2013 European Museum of the Year Award. It houses many exhibits of national and international importance. The Govan-Partick Bridge, which will provide a pedestrian and cycle path link from the museum across the Clyde to Govan, is set to be completed in 2024.
Fred Nicholas Severud was a Norwegian-born, American structural engineer. His projects included the St. Louis Gateway Arch, Seagram Building and Madison Square Garden.
Mark Whitby, BSc, FICE, FREng, Hon FRIBA, is a British structural engineer, and a past President of the Institution of Civil Engineers (2001-2002). He co-founded the multi-disciplinary engineering practices Whitby & Bird, Whitby & Mohajer Engineers (WME) in the UAE, and Whitby Wood in the UK.
Geiger Engineers is the doing business name of Geiger Lynch MacBain Campbell Engineers, P.C., an American structural engineering consulting firm located northwest of New York City. Founded in 1988 by David H. Geiger, Paul A. Gossen, Kris P. Hamilton, David D. Chen, David M. Campbell, and Mike Liao, the company has worked on large projects throughout the world. Starting from long span and tensile membrane structures, Geiger Engineers has branched out over the years into a range of specialties from designing sports facilities to providing engineering services for the entertainment industry.
Paul Westbury CBE CEng FREng FICE FIStructE is the CEO of the engineering company Buro Happold.
Christopher John Kenneth Williams is a British structural engineer and researcher who has specialised in the relationship between geometry and structural action. He works on a range of building types including thin-shell structures, gridshells and tension structures, as well as bridges and towers.
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