London, UK
Senior architect
at Fleet Architects
Fleet Architects is looking for a senior architect to join its team in London.
Fleet Architects was founded by Jaime Bishop and Richard Henson in 2009. Fleet is based in Hackney and Margate.
Fleet formed to pursue high-quality design in the public and social sectors, including healthcare, community and education. Increasingly we have been applying our methods successfully in other environments including fashion and hospitality.
We model and sketch to explore and explain our ideas, not just for presentations. These working materials are not precious, the purpose is to help us to work effectively with our clients to craft a design response to meet the project needs.
Fleet Architects consists of a tight highly skilled and motivated workforce. We aim to be market leaders and inspirational thinkers who can shape the future’s public buildings and civic spaces with a distinct focus on designing for building use and building users. The projects in the office range from £200k west-end fashion stores to £15 million intensive care units, from heritage fish smokehouses to seafront hotels and school media centres.
We have considerable experience in tackling complicated and challenging design problems from site conditions to planning negotiations which can often stall projects in their early stages. This will often include addressing sensitive planning or listed building issues, working with complex client bodies that may consist of several government agencies and appraising awkward sites that can place a strain on the procurement process.
We have a proven track record of developing outstanding designs with the desire to maintain quality throughout the delivery process while seeking to elevate common materials and systems to the enchanting and employ the seemingly everyday and banal in a challenging, imaginative manner.
Our proposals draw form from their location, using references such as material, scale or rhythm to inform and reinforce the permanence and relevance of our ideas. Fleet design buildings to add a new layer to the palimpsest of the village, town, park or city, adeptly making use of historical reference to celebrate the identity of a location without resorting to pastiche.
Our buildings are designed to be used: lived in, worked in and healed in. They are for the present, the future and the past of a place and the people that engage in them, not merely the designer at the instance when the hoarding is demounted.
In 2022, Fleet reached the final stage of the Wolfson Economic Prize for their manifesto for a ‘A Well Placed Hospital’.
Opportunity – Senior architect
Purpose of the role: providing skilled technical support to multiple complex projects, while overseeing individual projects personally. Following successful completion of the probation period, this role will be placed on a pathway for an Associateship.
Key responsibilities:
- independently running and overseeing projects, from client management to construction detailing
- managing a project’s design team from end-to-end, with clients, consultants, and local authorities to construction companies
- managing own and others’ workload at a strategic level
- managing conflicting deadlines with awareness of risks to the office
- demonstrating a strong understanding of construction
- demonstrating exceptional client and leadership skills
- mentoring and developing other team members
- line managing staff on accountable projects
Essential professional competencies:
- ARB registered Architect, with RIBA-recognised Part 3 course
- strong design awareness
- strong awareness of practice administrative procedures and contractual responsibilities
- detailed knowledge of UK construction methods
Advantageous professional competencies:
- healthcare design experience, and other public buildings
- volumetric and modular experience
Employee benefits:
- opportunity to conceive and deliver socially valuable work across a range of contrasting sectors – from small design led to major public projects
- staff well-being is prioritised with respect to office working hours
- blended office/home working and reduced and compressed hours can be requested
- opportunity to split working time across Fleet’s Hackney and the new Margate office
- scaling annual holiday allocation with increased seniority
- competitive salary