The EG Interview: The engineer pushing the industry for change

Hanif Kara is many things. An engineer, a designer, an innovator, a Harvard professor, an OBE and, in his own words, a weirdo. “I am absolutely a highly qualified weirdo,” says the founder and design director of structural and civil engineering practice AKT II. “I have deliberately tried to be different, and I have deliberately tried to be real. It does upset people sometimes, but I can’t help it.” Weirdness is also Kara’s calling card. He has built and grown a £30m practice employing some 350 people on the ethos of being more experimental, more ambitious and more innovative than most. He also understands developers. Bridging the gap between those who design and those who deliver, he can clearly see where frustrations lie. “Developers are confronted with a battlefield,” he says. “The world of design often talks about the world of design rather than the world of actually making a new world. And that is what developers have to do.” Kara gets it, though. While engineers rarely have their names in lights like their architectural colleagues – “you don’t do this job for the fame,” laughs Kara – he knows that taking a design and successfully translating it into a reality is one of the most critical steps in the entire development process. And he is one of the best in the business. The ultimate technical fixer, Kara was the man called in by Michael Bloomberg and Norman Foster when the City site secured for Bloomberg’s European HQ was discovered to be potentially “undevelopable” owing to the number of piles already in the ground. He was also the engineer brought on board to help manage the complex structural intricacies of the Francis Crick Institute, and was British Land’s structural expert on the reimagining of Broadgate. Kara’s reputation for successfully solving problems on high-profile, complex building projects has seen him become one of the industry’s most sought-after engineers, working on buildings for occupiers such as Apple, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and the Museum of London, and developers including British Land, Stanhope, Edge, Argent, Lodha, U+I, Greystar, Oxford Properties, Derwent London and Cadogan Estates. And now, as ambition, innovation and experimentation become the key tools in helping the built environment solve its carbon emissions conundrum, weirdos like Kara may be the secret weapon every developer in real estate needs. He says a culture of care and preservation has started to fuel some of the most significant changes he has ever seen in the way we design, develop, build and engineer to ensure a more sustainable future. And he is part of the driving force behind that change. Break it to make it As a long-standing rejector of the status quo, Kara has no qualms going up against the biggest egos in real estate and forcing them to “break the tracks” they are used to as part of a wider quest for a new approach to development and design. If the sector does this, he says, then the growing argument that we should stop developing new buildings altogether becomes ever weaker. There is no need to stop, he says. As long as there is an industry-wide commitment to developing well. “We have been refurbishing and rebuilding since the beginning of time,” says Kara. “We just haven’t been doing it very well for the last hundred or so years because the industry has been driven by a value system that is, sadly, too led by short-termism or capital models of supply chain.” As engineers we solve problems. But to do that you have to break things. You can’t forget the past entirely, but you do have to break old ideas Hanif Kara There is no better place, he adds, to develop new buildings well than in Western Europe, where cities such as London, Paris and Berlin offer a treasure trove of resources and historic techniques. “We can learn so much from our cities,” he says. “It is disappointing to see people thinking: oh well, if we put in planning to do x, y or z we won’t get it, so let’s just not do anything at all or retrofit. I hope we can shift this to come at things from a different direction and see how much we can learn from looking at how things were done successfully in the past, rather than just give up altogether.” He adds: “I don’t think the binary idea that we should just never build new is a good idea. Equally, I don’t think it is a bad thing to redo buildings. The Museum of London project is going to be incredible. We made a mess there building a railway underneath it so we are thinking: what can we do so we don’t leave that legacy as a problem for the next generation? What we do should be undoable but also valuable, so they don’t knock it down. “As engineers we solve problems. But to do that you have to break things. You can’t forget the past entirely, because construction is historic, but you do have to break old ideas. I am tenacious and audacious when it comes to debating about design and putting down egos but, equally, I will raise the aspirations of my clients.” This approach has seen the practice build a reputation for challenging architects, contractors and developers to ensure the delivery of successful projects early on. “We question things that people associate with value,” he says. “Things like square footage or getting planning within two years. We challenge those dynamics. That approach then manifests in projects that now are household names.” Bloomberg’s European HQ is a prime example. The selected site was the last island site left in the City, but the demolition of the six towers in situ revealed the ground was so full of piles it was almost impossible to develop. “Michael Bloomberg and Norman Foster brought me in to come up with a solution, and it was frightening because the only way you could develop a site like that was to shut it down for two years and dig every single pile out,” says Kara. “You have to be brave as an engineer to suggest that.” He adds: “We can’t do it alone. We have to work with people who will facilitate it. When you do that and find the right people to work with, you discover that there is a culture around real estate that is different from the perception many people have.” Material change For engineers and design technicians like AKT II, one of the major ways to reduce the built world’s contribution to the problem around climate is through the innovative use of more sustainable materials. Many people within the real estate sector can say this is on their radar, but when it comes to making these new materials work in practice, the responsibility rests largely on the shoulders of the structural engineers. AKT II is characteristically bold on this issue. It led one of the first uses of Earth Friendly Concrete piles on British Land’s 53-acre Canada Water project in November 2020, saving 240 tons of carbon emissions. The firm has also been working with Imperial College to patent and deploy an aggregate in concrete that could start to make the product cleaner. “We are pretty sure this is what will happen because the lime content and the cement, which is the guilty party in concrete, is not needed when we use this aggregate,” says Kara. The practice is also a strong advocate of research around the use of materials such as sea salt tiles and mycelium – a fungus with industrial-level strength that is being used to make organic bricks. Kara is quick to add that deployment and utilisation on a project-by-project basis is only part of the battle. The only way to make a worldwide difference, he says, is through research and education. Kara himself is a strong advocate of education as a professor of architectural technology at Harvard. It is a role he says enables him to successfully run his engineering business. “It takes up around 15% of my work life but delivers more than 60% of the intellectual rigour and profit in terms of what we do as a practice,” he says. “It’s hard to measure that but I firmly believe it is true. How do you redefine what we do as a discipline and reposition the value of design without that teaching and the learning you get from sharing information and hearing from new people with different perspectives?” Learning, sharing and being comfortable with change – and perhaps a little weirdness – is what Kara says has been key to the success of his business and the buildings he has helped engineer. That, and remembering that the only way to successfully solve the sector’s problems is to learn how to take on board the opinions, wishes and thoughts of many without losing sight of one’s own identity. It is all too easy to get caught up in the will of others, warns Kara, especially for engineers stuck between the architects, contractors and developers. “You have to accept that everyone has a different motivator,” he says. “Some have an ego, some don’t. But you can’t become them. That’s the risk. You have to be the vessel that takes in all of these different motivators while maintaining your own position and your own integrity.” AKT II: a potted history AKT II was founded in 1996 as AKT by Hanif Kara, Albert Williamson-Taylor and Robin Adams. Four years after its launch, it won its first prize, working with Will Alsop on Peckham Library in south London. The structure picked up the RIBA Stirling Prize. Since then, gongs have kept coming and the firm has continued to grow. With 350 people now employed across the business, it has offices in London, Manchester, Cambridge and Copenhagen. A new Toronto office opens this month. To send feedback, e-mail emily.wright@eg.co.uk or tweet @EmilyW_9 or @EGPropertyNews Photo by Valerie Bennett; other scheme photos: AKT II