Q&A with Richard Hyams, Founder and Director of astudio

What made you want to become an architect and what was your route into the profession?

I actually wanted to become a chef and worked in a restaurant in Bristol, which I absolutely loved.  But I grew up with architecture all around me. My dad, older brother and cousin were all architects, and my uncle was an architectural model maker, so I was surrounded by the profession from an early age.

I wanted to complete my A-Levels before joining cookery school, which is when I realised that the creativity of architecture was a great fit. From there I left my leafy village and moved to London, experiencing a massive culture shock while first starting out at South Bank Polytechnic, where I studied.

Graduating just after the recession in the 1980s, I reached out to all my favourite architects at the time. At first, no one wrote back to me, so I fell back into cooking. But on the day I was due to start a job at Ed’s Diner in London, I was invited for an interview at Fosters and met Ken Shuttleworth, a great inspiration of mine. I kept following up with him, and eventually convinced them to let me start out at Fosters, where I had an amazing time there for the next twelve years.

Read the whole interview here:

https://designerati.co.uk/qa-with-richard-hyams-founder-and-director-of-astudio/

See more Q&A’s with Richard over on his Instagram

Which architects or projects inspired to start your career, and who do you admire today?

I learnt a lot at South Bank from Pankaj Patel, who was my tutor at the time and is now a good friend of mine, but my most formative years as an architect were spent at Fosters. In fact, the first project that really excited me was Fosters’ design of the Renault Centre. I wrote my university thesis on the building due to my love of the design philosophy behind it, which compelled me to write to Fosters after graduating. The National theatre is one of my favourite buildings and I really admire Denys Lasdun.

While both Lasdun and Foster are all about detail and clarity of thought, I also really respect Thomas Heatherwick because he brings a sense of poetic challenge alongside his projects. His buildings always seem to be about more than just the design problems he’s solving.

Outside of architecture, Heston Blumenthal is a big inspiration of mine, and an interest in his way of working actually helped to inform the way we set up our practice, astudio. Heston’s approach dives into an analytical, chemical level of food, which is something we try to channel in our work as architects at astudio – to look at everything from all possible angles, testing the designs using technology before we build them.