BDP Podcast

Welcome to The Good City podcast series, where we bring together designers, planners, engineers, environmental thinkers, academics, and community voices to explore how design can help cities tackle their biggest challenges and create better places for people and the planet. In our second episode, Toronto - Growing Pains, we turn to one of North America’s most dynamic and pressured cities. Every ye...

Welcome to The Good City podcast series, where we bring together designers, planners, engineers, environmental thinkers, academics, and community voices to explore how design can help cities tackle their biggest challenges and create better places for people and the planet. In our first episode, Rotterdam: Climate Adaptation, we spotlight a city that has turned its greatest climate risks into a pl...

Panellists Michelle Xuereb (Host), Head of Innovation, BDP Quadrangle Eve Roodhouse, Chief Officer, Culture and Economy, Leeds City Council Deb Hetherington, Head of Innovation, Bruntwood SciTech Vicky Casey, Architect Director and head of Leeds Studio, BDP BDP's Innovation Applied campaign demonstrates how we harness innovation from within our industry to deliver exceptional results for our clien...

When we talk about the adaptive reuse of old buildings, we often think of buildings from pre WW1 – romantic buildings from the Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian era. But a large proportion of the UK building stock consists of vacant buildings dating from the fifties to seventies – the not so old, and not so loved buildings.  This genre of buildings are generally not considered as 'attractive' as p...

Long gone is the simple ‘pie and pint’ set up. Make way for a more nuanced, increasingly luxurious future for sports spectatorship.   From ‘fan villages’ modelled off the high street to a myriad of ticketing options offering enhanced dining, drinking and viewing add-ons, discover how top-tier venues like Everton Football Club and Ashes host, Lancashire County Cricket Ground, Emirates Old Trafford...

The training venue to the athlete is what the office is to the aspiring CEO - a place where elite sportspeople go to perfect their craft, hone their skills and connect with their team and trainers. Yet, in the highly competitive world of professional sport, can decisions taken during the design of training venues really determine a team’s long-term shot at victory? From personalisation to communit...

Not only are workers demanding more flexibility in where they work, but they are also increasingly directing the shape of our offices in a post-pandemic world. But what do employees really want and need from workplaces that can’t be achieved from home setups? In this week’s episode, our guests reveal what it takes to create a truly hybrid and inclusive workplace, and how to elevate office design f...

How can we give power to those historically excluded from planning processes and champion inclusive spaces for all, from the moment a rendering is drafted through to the completion of a building? Navigating the complex conversations of cost, timelines, funding and representation - and how these impact the inclusive design process - this week’s guests ask how we can challenge default norms to accou...

The design of buildings and spaces can shape our behaviour and perceptions of the world in subtle yet powerful ways. How then, have public spaces come to impact people of different genders and reinforced narrow stereotypes and assumptions? For the debut podcast in our Design for Inclusion series, we invited four guests to share their experiences of designing for gender equity. From wayfinding and...

Why do some buildings last for centuries while others disappear in mere decades? From the remerging role of passive design measures to creating ‘flexible’ buildings, this week sees guest experts from our lighting, engineering and architecture teams question what it takes to design long-lasting, sustainable buildings for generations to come.     Featured projects Welsh School of Architecture Senate...

This week, Alan Davies and his new panel of experts discuss how to bring old buildings back to life. As we emerge from the global pandemic, new civic strategies require more modern solutions for spaces. From adaptive reuse of historic structures to retrofit projects in modern buildings, there are more options available to building owners and designers than ever before. Retrofit and refurbishment s...

Alan Davies is joined by Tianyi Gu, Akshay Khera and Illyas Maljee to explore how adaptive reuse is becoming a global trend in design and architecture. No one country has the ability to solve the climate emergency and when it comes to the reuse of buildings, we have to be sensitive to the building stock, environments and policies that influence the industry. But how does this affect the design and...

In this first episode of our debut series, Old Buildings - New Beginnings, BDP’s head of heritage, Alan Davies meets with Lucy Townsend, Il’ic Testoni and James Hepburn to ask the fundamental question, ‘Can we make historic buildings sustainable?’ They discuss how to measure sustainability in old buildings and analyse what we can do to adapt existing structures to meet ever-stringent net zero carb...

In this episode of Old Buildings - New Beginnings, Alan Davies is joined by Jesse Klimitz, Christine Davis and David Artis to discuss how to make old buildings more inclusive. Together they debate the meaning of accessibility, inclusivity and equality in the built environment, highlighting physical and perceived barriers that users can face. Concluding the episode, our experts discuss how heritage...