Sun 4 Feb 2007
... with John Assael
This month Michael Dineen talks to John Assael, founder and managing director of specialist residential practice Assael Architecture.
It was a ladies’ loo in Mayfair that set John Assael on the road to fortune.Well, every architect has to start somewhere and Assael, impatient to put his design ideas into practice after the usual seven-year spell of study was keen to impress his first real client.
Who was this? The Robert Stigwood Organisation, famous for handling, inter alia, The Bee Gees and Eric Clapton. And the RSO was so impressed with the loo that they kept the young Assael in work for the next decade.
Now Assael Architecture Limited, on the brink, one suspects, of a much more public presence in the industry, is based in a riverside open plan suite of offices in Fulham. The company numbers 70 motivated people who operate in an egalitarian atmosphere, with the quiet and amiable Assael in the managing directorial chair – but not obviously so.
There’s a palpable esprit de corps about the place but it doesn’t scream at you, and he is keen to tell me that everyone on the payroll has a degree in addition to competence in draughtsmanship. He is equally keen to tell me that about one third of his staff are non-architects, and some of these have hard-nosed management skills, that put them above designers in earning power.
However, “Everybody is expected to draw – even my PA, and her degree is textiles. We are a pretty arty outfit and I think that being able to draw is fundamental to being able to communicate your ideas.”
There are no drawing boards in evidence but plenty of sketchpads and, of course, computers: “Quite often and quite quickly those sketches get converted into computer images. Basic designs are almost always carried out on sketchpads.”
The notion of explaining what you mean with a drawing rather than limpid prose interests Assael, for his own flair is the product of equal skill in art and mathematics. This unusual combination is, he believes, linked to the dyslexia which is quite common among architects – himself included.
“I’m suspicious of an architect if he writes very beautifully. It makes me suspect he won’t be very creative in design.”
And when he told me Assael Architecture Limited welcomes dyslexics I suggested facetiously that he must specify this in staff want-ads.
“You can’t do that!”
His reproof brought to my mind the picture of some busybody job’s worth in an over-staffed equal opportunities bureau rushing headlong into litigation.
After some thought he added: “Perhaps we could, though, because we’d be taking on people who are handicapped.”
Except, of course, that he obviously doesn’t believe that, for he sees some degree of dyslexia as a plus in architecture.
Contact with the bureaucratic mind is part of Assael’s daily round. He actually enjoys the complexities of his firm’s schemes, involving urban regeneration, listed buildings and conservation areas. “I love that bit. I go to every public meeting. I love going through the process of finding out what everybody wants, the business of getting schemes through the system.”
And above all that, I suspect he loves most providing original designs. But the actual building process interests him less, and he has the backup staff to handle this.
I quizzed him about how he gets new business and his reply was, as ever, frank: “We have a very clear idea of what we’re good at. This means that we’ll never be multi-disciplinary; we are simply architects that specialise in complicated urban regeneration projects involving housing. So we do rely very much on our reputation; and though we do have a marketing budget and people who help us to promote ourselves, we very rarely speak at conferences, we very rarely entertain people unless we know them already. We rely very heavily on personal recommendation. In fact 87 per cent of our work is repeat business.”
All of which is a very long way from the start of his career, when he had to fill part of his student log book with time spent at a Health Authority office in Croydon. “It was the most boring and awful place I have ever been. They were extremely lazy people; the worst experience for an aspiring architect. I was told to stop working so hard, told to take the tea brakes and the lunch breaks instead of sitting at my drawing board.”
He couldn’t wait to get away, and as soon as he was able he moved in with a small, talented team of Chiswick architects: “They were very motivated and dealing with quite small schemes. It was fabulous experience for two years, but as soon as I could I set up on my own. I had my own practice at 28.”
Pretty soon after that his payroll numbered 20. Then came the late 1980s when “we took a bit of a bashing and had to contract to six. Five of those are still with me. Then in 1994 we decided to look again at the type of work we were doing and decided to redesign the business. We started again with a completely new mission statement – and dumped a lot of the clients we had. We became very focused – on the kind of work we’re still doing today.”
Which is?
Riverside Quarter, a large housing scheme in Wandsworth; a complicated conversion of the former MI6 building for Crest at Waterloo, a British Steel building on Albert Embankment for Berkeley Homes and the ex-Glaxo building designed by Wallis Gilbert and Partners (begetters of the more famous Hoover Building on Western Avenue) in the 1930s.
All these are schemes which, to a certain extent, echo the past, but a truly modern Assael design statement is currently emerging in west London.
“We are building one of the tallest constructions around; it will be a beautiful cylinder of glass, a shimmering tube which is going to be a landmark,” he told me. The Assael Tower – it had no name when I spoke to him – will be the centre piece of a vast development including 850 flats, a hotel and shops for Barratt. It will involve 15 of Assael’s staff for the next five years.
John Assael admires the work of Foster and Rogers, and I wonder if this shimmering tube may announce a new star in their lordly firmament.
First published in Show House Magazine February 2007.
The greatest care has been taken to ensure accuracy but some information contained within this article may have changed since it was first published.
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