It was a pioneering spirit and a certain amount of chutzpah that saw Gordon Ryder and Peter Yates form their own practice - Ryder and Yates - in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne back in the 1950s. Drawing on their experiences working with Le Corbusier and Ove Arup, it was clear right from the start that delivering projects that worked for clients, required thinking that transcended traditional disciplines and silos.
Today, operating as Ryder Architecture, and with offices in Newcastle, Liverpool, Glasgow, Hong Kong and Vancouver, it's no surprise to see the team delivering 'Everything architecture' with the goal of improving the world around us and in so doing improving people's lives.
Those aims have seen the firm embrace and champion the new era of collaborative construction and deliver award-winning projects in the UK and around the world. And through their BIM Academy joint venture, with Northumbria University, launched in 2010, the team have been instrumental in spearheading the wider digital construction revolution.
For all that has changed, it's heartening to see the core values remain true to those original tenets espoused by the founders of the firm.
Ryder's story serves as a clear illustration of the pace of change in the industry. Contrast the days of drawing boards or even CAD to modern-day projects and you see magnitudes of efficiency improvements. The driving forces? Technology, for sure, which has taken care of those repetitive tasks of old, but also an astute focus on investing in the design process to deliver projects that truly deliver for clients.
For all the talk of technology through discussions with the team it's clear that delivering the best possible service and buildings for clients, powered by an effective management process, is what lies at the heart of Ryder's success story.
Working with Northumbria University to establish BIM Academy, the team at Ryder were quick to recognise the opportunity to spread the word about the opportunities afforded by digital tools and techniques across the construction industry. It would prove to be a timely move - with BIM expertise honed in the north east helping to shape the national debate around BIM Level 2. It also helped the team at Ryder form connections with academics around the world and to feed all that expertise back into projects and process, wherever they may be.
Often one key project is all it takes for the thinking, process engineering and technology to come together and really get results. Ryder cite their work on Manchester Central Library back in 2009 as being instrumental. Here the client really engaged with the opportunity afforded by a whole range of BIM benefits and what this would mean at design, build and crucially, in use, through a robust operational model for facilities management.
Today the team use Autodesk Revit, coupled with NBS Create to hone a highly-effective digital workflow.
By contributing to the research that delivers powerful tools like the NBS Viewer enables ever-closer collaboration - and it's this that really excites the team at Ryder. The next few years will see the industry putting data to work as part of the push towards Digital Built Britain and the further evolution and adoption of BIM Level 2.
As Ryder continues to flourish across continents and time zones, its investment and growth in digital expertise has allowed the practice to apply its ethos of Everything architecture to global clients.
