Buro Happold leads our workshop on sustainability at 'Cultural Cities'

Image: Anna Woodeson - courtesy of Buro Happold

Future Cities Forum is delighted that Anna Woodeson, Partner and Sustainability Lead at Buro Happold, will be running our workshop at the 'Cultural Cities and sustainable tourism' discussion event this month, hosted by Historic Royal Palaces at the Tower of London.

The workshop will present a challenge to participants on best practice in climate resilience strategies for the cultural sector to protect buildings and estates as well as improve their business operations.

Anna joined the sustainability team at Buro Happold after 28 years working as an architect, specialising in embedding sustainability in its broadest sense within the built environment.

Apart from a few short stints in Sri Lanka, Holland and Manchester, Anna has worked in London for most of this time across numerous sectors and scales.

Anna has worked with Buro Happold many times over her career including most recently when she led the Battersea Power Station team at Wilkinson Eyre Architects, working from the Buro Happold office in London.

In her spare time, Anna is chair of community energy organisation Power Up North London – that seeks to empower communities to contribute to London’s decarbonisation. She is also a trustee of Architects Declare, recently launching a pre-election policy manifesto.

Alongside this, Anna has tutored for many years and is a regular awards judge. She also heads up the building sustainability subgroup in the sustainability team and has a particular passion and expertise in retrofit.

Buro Happold is also working with a collaborative team led by Allies and Morrison and Asif Khan Studio, designing a multi-million pound renewal of the Barbican arts centre and public spaces.

The project will preserve and celebrate the iconic building’s original architectural vision, while attracting new and diverse audiences, providing new opportunities for the Barbican’s diverse community of partners, artists and audiences, and boosting the building’s accessibility and environmental performance.

The major renewal of the Barbican Centre is planned to take place in phases across the next decade. A multidisciplinary team of experts from Buro Happold is playing a key role across this large scale, integrated and collaborative regeneration project.

Designed by Chamberlin, Powell and Bon and built between 1965 and 1982, the Barbican was part of a visionary plan to radically transform how we experience the urban landscape resulting in a unique mixed-use development with residential, recreational and cultural facilities, alongside a lake and landscaping, a conservatory, and high-rise housing all together on a 14-hectare site in the City of London.

Each year, more than a million people attend Barbican events performed by hundreds of artists from across the globe.

The Renewal Programme aims to help meet the City Corporation’s climate targets and restore the Barbican’s original architectural vision. Buro Happold has been engaged to provide broad multidisciplinary consultancy across everything from building services engineering (MEP) and structural engineering to sustainability and people movement digital modelling.