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AUL SANDILANDS ISN’T
interested in the conventional architect’s ego trip of planting
new landmarks on maps. He and partner Alex Lifschutz are
more interested in making deserts bloom: reviving dead
buildings, postcodes and brands, and in doing so creating
spaces and environments that off er experiences, memories and
emotional attachments. Bundled up, these are what enhance
the value of a property and the surrounding area. Sandilands’
conversation is all about ‘context’ and the inner ergonomics of
a building, the interplay of light, space and functionality, rather
than adding another protrusion on the skyline template.
I meet him at Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands (LDS)’s
studio in the former headquarters of Island Records, cleverly
concealed behind the elegant Georgian architecture of St
Peter’s Square in leafy west London. At 54, he looks exactly
as he did when he was 40: short, straight greyish hair, glasses,
pointy nose, cheeky grin, mouth poised to pontifi cate on
whatever topic springs to mind. He speaks in a rambling
Birmingham drawl. Sometimes you want to jump in and give
him a good edit. Th e other about him is his indestructible
confi dence. I can’t see him ever being fazed or outwitted by a
fi ring squad of developers, bankers
and lawyers. But then Sandilands
has a lot to be confi dent about.
LDS sprang into being after
Alex Lifschutz and Ian Davidson
collaborated under Norman Foster
on the remarkable headquarters of
the Hongkong and Shanghai
Banking Corporation (now
HSBC) in the early 1980s. Th is
revolutionary building turned
architecture inside out: the skeletal
structure formed the exterior, while
the interior was a huge atrium, like
a cathedral to Mammon. In 1986,
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Lifschutz and Davidson spun off and teamed up. Sandilands
joined two years later. He’d previously worked at Powell &
Moya, the practice that designed St Paul’s School in Barnes,
and the art gallery at Christchurch Oxford. In 2003 Davidson
died of a heart attack at 48 after a cycling trip. Sandilands
shows no signs of fl agging as LDS’s front man.
LDS got a pat on the head from God very early on. One
of its fi rst commissions was the arching, tunnel-like roof
extension for Richard Rogers’ design studio overlooking the
Th ames (next time you eat at Rogers’ wife’s famous River Café,
just go outside and look up). Rogers’ own team of architects
were ‘too busy’ to do the work themselves, but the commission
represented a benediction. Another notable LDS project is the
twin Hungerford pedestrian bridges fl ung across the Th ames
either side of the railway line that spans the river from Charing
Cross to the Royal Festival Hall: a corridor sketched in lines,
all steel pylons and cables, like the rigging of an old ship.
Since then, the fi rm has refurbished, reinvented and
reinvigorated dozens of old buildings. One of their most
celebrated commissions is Oxo Tower Wharf on the South
Bank in London. Th e last remaining wharf-site on that
particular reach of the Th ames, the Oxo was stuck in a semiderelict
no-man’s land. Drawing upon the building’s previous
incarnations, a power station and a meat warehouse, LDS
turned it into a mixed-use building of low-rent social housing,
shops, art galleries and a gleaming ‘posh’ restaurant off ering a
panoramic sweep almost as good as the London Eye’s. As
architectural critic Jonathan Glancey wrote in Ian Davidson’s
Thirty
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