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, PRIVATDESIGN 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 PHOTO©GETTY
PRIVATDESIGN Previous page: the showpiece top-fl oor food hall at La Rinascente in Milan. This page: the beaten-steel ceiling of Moscow’s Tsvetnoy Market. Opposite page from top: Harvey Nichols’ Fifth Floor; Hungerford Bridge; Paul Sandilands
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