Specialist insurer Hiscox has announced that it is to continue its sponsorship of the annual Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) House of the Year award.  The RIBA House of the Year award is presented every year to the best new house or house extension designed by an architect in the UK. It was created in 2001 and for many years presented by the RIBA as the Manser Medal. Previous winners include Skene Catling de la Peña for Flint House (2015), Loyn & Co for Stormy Castle (2014), Carl Turner Architects for Slip House (2013) and Acme for Hunsett Mill (2010). The renewal of this partnership reflects Hiscox’s expertise in home insurance, and complements its existing commitments to art and design in the communities in which it operates. This includes involvement in initiatives such as Sculpture in the City. Hiscox is also proud to support innovative building projects, providing comprehensive cover for renovations and extensions. As part of its involvement in the RIBA House of the Year 2016 Philip Thorn, Head of Direct Home Insurance will join the jury.  Other jury members are Meredith Bowles, Mole Architects (jury chair); Charlotte Skene Catling, Skene Catling de la Peña (winner in 2015); Jonathan Dallas, Dallas Pierce Quintero; and Jenny Éclair, novelist, actress & client of the 2005 award-winning house. Philip Thorn, Head of Direct Home Insurance at Hiscox UK said: “We have worked with RIBA for many years and share their passion and commitment for design. We have been insuring unique homes for decades and recently moved into our own award winning new office in York. We have also just launched a new ‘renovation and extension’ insurance product to ensure anyone that wants to make their home even more special can do so with complete confidence. I look forward to seeing the short-listed homes, being inspired by them all and celebrating with the winner.’ The RIBA House of the Year award will be broadcast as part of a special Channel 4 Grand Designs series, presented by Kevin McCloud. Now in its second year, Grand Designs: House of the Year, produced by Boundless, is to be broadcast weekly for four weeks later in the year. Featuring a selection of properties from the longlist for the UK’s most prestigious new house award, it will reveal the shortlisted and winning homes.  Ends For further information please contact:  Hiscox Ltd Lucy Hensher +44 (0) 20 7448 6619 Lucy.hensher@HISCOX.com RIBA Howard Crosskey +44 (0)20 7307 3761 howard.crosskey@riba.org   Notes to editors  1. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) champions better buildings, communities and the environment through architecture and our members. For further information, visitwww.architecture.com or @RIBA on Twitter. 2. Hiscox is a global specialist insurer with a 100 year heritage of insuring unusual or complex risks, such as high value homes, fine art and other collections. RIBA House of the Year is sponsored by Hiscox Home Insurance, visit www.hiscox.co.uk/home   for more information about our Home Insurance. Posted on Friday 1st July 2016 Source link

24 August 2016 | Herpreet Kaur Grewal Support services firm Carillion has seen its underlying profit from operations increase over the last financial half-year. The group’s half-year financial report for the six months ended 30 June 2016 says the company’s performance was led by revenue and margin growth in support services, which accounted for some 60 per cent of total underlying operating profit. Its average net borrowing is similar to 2015 and full-year average of £538.9 million and in line with expectations.  Carillion stated that the pipeline of contract opportunities were worth £41.5 billion (31 December 2015: £41.4 billion). The report added that the balance sheet remained robust, with over £1.4 billion of committed funding available to the group. Chairman Philip Green said: “I am pleased to report that the group’s first-half results are in line with our expectations, led by a strong performance in our support services business, which accounted for nearly two thirds of the group’s underlying operating profit. New order intake in the first half of the year has been strong and continues to reflect the success of our strategy and strength of our business model. Overall, we remain on track to make further progress in 2016.” Source link

Category: Construction Industry Today | Subscribe to Construction Industry Today Feed Published Fri, Apr 15th 2016 Esh Group, including Livingston-based Esh Border Construction, has been singled out the Sunday Times BDO Profit Track 100 after recording an average profit growth of 75 per cent over three years. Posted via Industry Today. Follow us on Twitter @IndustryToday Esh Group, including Livingston-based Esh Border Construction, has been named in the Sunday Times BDO Profit Track 100. The group was placed at 54 on the list, which ranks the UK’s private companies with the fastest growing profits over three years. The construction specialist was named in the league table after recording an average profit growth of 75 per cent for that period. In 2014, it delivered a turnover of £253m and profit before tax of £9.1m The annual rundown placed Esh Group alongside such Scottish names as Dumfries and Galloway-based Edinburgh Woollen Mill, Aberdeen’s BrewDog, and Glasgow’s Paterson Quarries. The league table and awards programme is sponsored by BDO and UBS Wealth Management, and is compiled by Fast Track, the Oxford-based research and networking events firm. Esh Border Construction has firmly established its place in Scotland since opening a regional office in Livingston last year, supporting further growth prospects and helping to secure new business wins. Among Scottish successes, Esh Border Construction was named the appointed contractor on Historic Scotland’s £8.9milion Engine Shed project in Forthside, Stirling, which is due to open later this year. Despite turbulent international markets and the looming EU referendum, the Profit Track 100 league table indicates those benefitting from a period of sustained economic stimulus and growth – and Esh Border Construction believes that it has benefitted from a collaborative strategy that has helped to harness a revitalised construction industry north of the border.  Simon Phillips, Regional Managing Director for Esh Border Construction, said: “As part of Esh Group, we are proud to have been named on the BDO Profit Track 100. “Esh Group’s place on the list is recognition of the hard work of all our staff and the valued support of our supply chain and customers. “Being ranked alongside some of the best businesses in the country such as BrewDog and Edinburgh Woollen Mill tells us that we are moving in the right direction – and our Scottish presence has aided that progress. “We underlined our commitment to Scotland last year with the opening of our Livingston base, and have continued to enjoy a pleasing pipeline of work including new build developments, sympathetic regeneration work, and high quality social housing. “The new base widens our coverage in Scotland and has enabled us to deliver projects across the Central Belt. “The extension of our Added Value work in the community via our award-winning Building My Skills programme – supported by over 60 other businesses – has also further demonstrated our commitment to Scotland. “Of course, a major part of any company’s success is also its partners; we firmly believe that working closely with our subcontractors and suppliers is key. “With the number of infrastructure and construction projects across Scotland continually increasing, adding value in everything you do is increasingly a key driver of sustainable growth.” Terry Jones, partner at BDO, the title sponsor of the league table, said: “Medium-sized businesses across the UK are thriving, creating one in four jobs and responsible for one third of the country’s total revenue. “They are seizing the opportunities a recovering economy presents and the most profitable have remained focused on sustainable growth through investment in innovation, diversification and overseas expansion.”  Source link

Zaha Hadid is the first woman to be awarded the Royal Gold Medal in her own right The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has today (24 September 2015) announced that the globally-renowned architect Dame Zaha Hadid will receive the 2016 Royal Gold Medal, the first woman to be awarded the prestigious honour in her own right. Zaha Hadid is internationally known for her built, theoretical and academic work. Each of her dynamic and innovative projects builds on over thirty years of revolutionary experimentation and research in the fields of architecture, design and urbanism. Given in recognition of a lifetime’s work, the Royal Gold Medal is approved personally by Her Majesty The Queen and is given to a person or group of people who have had a significant influence “either directly or indirectly on the advancement of architecture”. Awarded since 1848, past Royal Gold Medallists include Frank Gehry (2000), Norman Foster (1983), Frank Lloyd Wright (1941) and Sir George Gilbert Scott (1859). RIBA President and chair of the selection committee, Jane Duncan, said: “Zaha Hadid is a formidable and globally-influential force in architecture. Highly experimental, rigorous and exacting, her work from buildings to furniture, footwear and cars, is quite rightly revered and desired by brands and people all around the world. I am delighted Zaha will be awarded the Royal Gold Medal in 2016 and can’t wait to see what she and her practice will do next.” Born in Baghdad in 1950, Zaha Hadid started her architectural journey in 1972 studying at the progressive Architectural Association in London. She joined her former professors, Rem Koolhaas and Elia Zenghelis, at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, where she became a partner in 1977. By 1979 she had established her own practice in London – Zaha Hadid Architects – garnering a reputation across the world for her trail-blazing theoretical works including The Peak in Hong Kong (1983), the Kurfürstendamm in Berlin (1986) and the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales (1994). Working with office partner Patrik Schumacher, Hadid’s interest is in the interface between architecture, landscape, and geology; which her practice integrates with the use of cutting-edge technologies – the result is often unexpected and dynamic architectural forms. Hadid’s first major built commission, one that catapulted her rise, was the Vitra Fire Station in Weil Am Rhein, Germany (1993); subsequent notable projects including the MAXXI: Italian National Museum of 21st Century Arts in Rome (2009), the London Aquatics Centre for the 2012 Olympic Games (2011) and the Heydar Aliyev Centre in Baku (2013) illustrate her quest for complex, fluid space. Buildings such as the Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in Cincinnati (2003) and the Guangzhou Opera House in China (2010) have also been hailed as architecture that transforms our ideas of the future with new spatial concepts and dynamic, visionary forms. In 2004 Zaha Hadid became the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize. She has twice won the UK’s most prestigious architecture award, the RIBA Stirling Prize: in 2010 for the MAXXI Museum in Rome, a building for the staging of 21st Century art, the distillation of years of experimentation, a mature piece of architecture conveying a calmness that belies the complexities of its form and organisation; and the Evelyn Grace Academy, a unique design, expertly inserted into an extremely tight site, that shows the students, staff and local residents they are valued and celebrates the school’s specialism throughout its fabric, with views of student participation at every turn. Zaha Hadid’s other awards include the Republic of France’s Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Japan’s Praemium Imperiale and in 2012, Zaha Hadid was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She was made Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Fellow of the American Institute of Architecture. Zaha has held various adademic roles including the Kenzo Tange Chair at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University; the Sullivan Chair at the University of Illinois, School of Architecture; guest professorships at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg; the Knolton School of Architecture, Ohio and the Masters Studio at Columbia University, New York; the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. – ends – Notes to editors 1. For more information, members of the press should contact: Gagandeep Bedi, Press Officer, RIBA: gagandeep.bedi@riba.org or call 020 7307 3814 2. For more information on the Royal Gold Medal, please visit https://www.architecture.com/RIBA/Awards/RoyalGoldMedal/RoyalGoldMedal.aspx 3. The 2016 Royal Gold Medal selection committee comprises of RIBA President Jane Duncan with Sir Peter Cook, Neil Gillespie OBE, Victoria Thornton OBE and the 2015 Royal Gold Medallist John Tuomey. 4. The RIBA champions better buildings, communities and the environment through architecture and our members www.architecture.com @RIBA 5. The 2016 Royal Gold Medal citation, written by Professor Sir Peter Cook founder of Archigram, the 2004 recipients of the Royal Gold Medal, follows: In our current culture of ticking every box, surely Zaha Hadid succeeds, since (to quote the Royal Gold Medal criteria) she is someone “who has made a significant contribution to the theory or practice of architecture…. for a substantial body of work rather than for work which is currently fashionable.” Indeed her work, though full of form, style and unstoppable mannerism, possesses a quality that some of us might refer to as an impeccable ‘eye’: which we would claim is a fundamental in the consideration of special architecture and is rarely satisfied by mere ‘fashion’. And surely her work is special. For three decades now, she has ventured where few would dare: if Paul Klee took a line for a walk, then Zaha took the surfaces that were driven by that line out for a virtual dance and then deftly folded them over and then took them out for a journey into space. In her earlier, ‘spiky’ period there was already a sense of vigour that she shared with her