ADP has just nipped into the top 25 this year, by adding one architect. This is a practice that is distributed around the UK, with offices in London, Edinburgh and Glasgow, as well as in Birmingham, Manchester, Newcastle, Oxford and Sherborne. The Oxford and London offices are the largest, with 15 architects apiece. Edinburgh, which only opened in 2015, has just completed the Learning Commons building for Herriot-Watt University. The only international office is in Delhi, with six architects and a total staff of nine.
Now 52 years old, ADP has converted to an employee-owned structure with the significant majority of its shares being owned by an Employee Ownership Trust on behalf of all 130 employees. It has also won the Investors in People gold standard, a considerable achievement.
Schools are a particular strength of the practice, and it has recently completed Eden Boys’ School Birmingham for Tauheedul Education Trust. In higher education, the practice estimates that it is working for one quarter of the UK’s institutions. It has designed the ICEPS building for the University of Leeds, which will be a £96 million integrated campus for the faculties of engineering and physical sciences to build on a shared interaction between disciplines. Also at Leeds, last year the practice’s Laidlaw Library won an RIBA National Award.
The practice’s masterplan for the University of Sussex is aimed at protecting the coherence and calm of Sir Basil Spence’s original vision for the site by banishing cars to the periphery. As part of this work, ADP has designed a car park with a façade based on fractal geometry.
