John McRae
John McRae joined Orms in 1997 and is a Trustee and a Director of the practice with Oliver Richards, Richard Keating and Colin McColl.
John has experience working across a broad range of sectors, including workplace, education, residential and healthcare. His focus is on creating architecture that is sensitive to the users’ individual and collective needs.
He says, “Over the last ten years I have developed a strong interest in creating environments that contribute to users’ wellbeing, in part through an ongoing relationship with the charity Teenage Cancer Trust. With them, we developed a design blueprint for developments throughout the UK, including The Skypad Cardiff, which has won a number of prestigious awards. This approach has proved just as valid in workplace projects such as No 1 Cornhill, Capital One and MediaCom, and on our more recent Wigmore Street, Windmill Street and Chancery Lane schemes in central London. It has also translated into our education work, such as the new science building we are developing at Uppingham School.”
John is a member of the British Council for Offices and has contributed to a number of conferences including: Ecobuild, RIBA’s good design it all adds up, Future Health & Care Expo, Future of Sustainability webinar, and BEST. He is on the editorial board of Design Exchange magazine and in 2012 instigated the practice’s THiNK initiative, which seeks to gain greater insight into the issues faced by the architectural profession.