Buro Happold: 50 Years of Courage and Care - by Hugh Pearman
Author of the new book, Buro Happold - Engineering, Design and Advisory: 50 Years of Courage and Care, Hugh Pearman, discusses some of the most groundbreaking projects by Buro Happold:
The new wonders of the world
Writing about Buro Happold was to enter a world of extraordinary achievements. This is an outfit with the skills and range to change our habitats physically and environmentally much for the better, with plenty of visual drama along the way.
Here’s the background. Ted Happold, already a noted high-achieving and unorthodox structural engineer (he’d worked on the Sydney Opera House and the Pompidou Centre in Paris) established his boutique firm with a bunch of like-minded colleagues in 1976 in Bath, England. It rapidly grew, collected complementary disciplines and forged bonds with other professionals and clients. Today it is a multi-national consultancy that can and does plan and implement complete urban realms.
There are 50 individual case studies in this book marking the firm’s 50th anniversary, and many other built and unbuilt projects mentioned along the way. Some of these have the hand of Ted Happold on them directly but the majority have happened in the 30 years since his death, guided by his ideals and ambition. Researching all of these and talking to the individuals concerned was for me sometimes a matter of revisiting famous places by famous architects, and sometimes a complete voyage of discovery.
Here are some of the game-changers, for the firm and for engineering and place-making generally.
Pink Floyd stage umbrellas, 1977 (55 shows in ten countries). Lightweight structures, part of the ‘high-tech’ movement, were an early calling-card for Happold, while Pink Floyd were the most architecturally-savvy of rock bands. The result – designed with long-term Happold collaborators Frei Otto and Bodo Rasch – was a beautiful, sculptural set of stage umbrellas for the band’s ‘In the Flesh’ stadium tour of Europe and America. The umbrellas rose through the stage and unfurled like flowers to protect the band from rain or sun.
So what? Those umbrellas were the start of a line of enquiry that led to the largest convertible roof in the world today. It consists of 250 intersecting, climate-controlling giant retractable sunshades covering 150,000 m2 (1.6 million sq ft) and 250,000 pilgrims at the Holy Mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia.
Kuwait Sea City, 1987 – present. This one amazed me. How do you double the coastline of a small Gulf kingdom? It takes time, but over the decades Buro Happold has conjured up 120 miles of new waterfront for Kuwait. Not by reclaiming land from the sea as happens elsewhere, but by carving new sea inlets out of what was existing low-grade land. Hydrodynamically modelled to work naturally with the tidal flows of the Gulf, they are increasing biodiversity while simultaneously providing the basis for a new southern Kuwaiti city of 250,000, complete with all the necessary infrastructure. This is Big Civil Engineering in the service both of humans and the natural environment.
The Millennium Dome (now O2 London), Greenwich, 1996-1999. Built for the UK’s Millennium exhibition, now a thriving entertainment complex, technically it is not a dome, but a very big rigid tent, a tensile structure spun from cables suspended from 12 masts. It is 365 metres across, its roof rises to 50m, its circumference is one kilometre and it is lighter than the air it contains. Designed with architects the Richard Rogers Partnership at a time when the contents of the ‘New Millennium Experience’ had yet to be decided, it was accomplished at great speed and with tremendous verve and it took Buro Happold to a new level. We take it for granted now but it is an absolute marvel. It should be a listed building!
How can a museum of antiquities lead to one of the world’s largest airports? Consider the British Museum Queen Elizabeth II Great Court, in London, another of the UK’s Millennium projects. It looks both dramatic and effortless as we expect from its architect, Norman Foster. Now look at the astonishing new centrepiece of Singapore’s Jewel Changi Airport (2013-2019), by Moshe Safdie, with extensive terraced tropical gardens surrounding a waterfall pouring from an oculus in the roof. That geometrically complex ‘gridshell’ lattice roof weighs 6,000 tons, is the largest of its kind in the world, and would have been rather simpler if it hadn’t had to dodge round an existing elevated airport train running through the space. But then the equivalent gridshell at the BM Great Court had to arrange itself around the famous Round Reading Room. They like a challenge, do Buro Happold.
Staying with museums, here’s another modern wonder of the world: The Louvre Abu Dhabi 2007-17. Architect Jean Nouvel had an idea, for a museum like a rediscovered desert kingdom, complete with a large waterside entrance courtyard sheltered by a hovering dome ’made of a web of different patterns interlaced into a translucent ceiling which lets a diffuse, magical light come through in the best tradition of great Arabian architecture.’ Great – so how do you build that, exactly? Finding out how and then doing it was another great leap forward for Buro Happold. I could explain how it works but I’d be here all day. Read the book! Nouvel’s ‘magical light’’ is exactly what was achieved.
Moving into a complete city district where green landscape predominates, you have King Salman Park, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, 2019-2030. Buro Happold has been active in the Kingdom since its earliest days, especially in Riyadh. This project, with Buro Happold and SETEC in a joint venture led by Gerber Architekten, is incredibly ambitious: the site of the city’s former airport is being transformed into one of the world’s largest urban parks, covering 17.2 km2 (6.6 square miles). That is seven times the area of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens combined in London, and five times that of Central Park in Manhattan. It is an entirely new, topographically varied and heavily forested and planted landscape with watercourses, providing shade and coolness and incorporating a new cultural quarter.
Back in London and forever associated with Pink Floyd’s ‘Animals’ album cover with the giant inflatable pig between its chimneys, is Battersea Power Station (redevelopment 2012-present). This is far more than the restoration of what had been a derelict but beloved industrial landmark: it is a £9 billion 15 hectare post-industrial regeneration project, a new London district built in multiple phases including a new Underground Line and station. So varied and complex is it that it forms the largest case study in the book. Buro Happold has been embedded in the project since the earliest days, working with some of the world’s top architects and designers. In my nerdish way, what I found most satisfying about it all was the way they reconstructed all four chimneys using pretty much the exact techniques as originally. Visually and intellectually, those chimneys hold everything together.
– Hugh Pearman, 2026
Hugh Pearman is an architectural writer, editor and consultant. He is the author of several books including About Architecture: An Essential Guide in 55 Buildings (Yale University Press), Airports: A Century of Architecture (Laurence King and Abrams), Charcoalblue: Designing for Performance and Cullinan Studio in the 21st Century (both Lund Humphries). He was architecture and design critic for The Sunday Times, 1986-2016, Editor of the RIBA Journal, 2006-2020, and was Chair of the Twentieth Century Society 2023-2026.
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