21 August 2024
Judging the Drawing of the Year Award 2024
- News
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Hayes Davidson is one of the world’s leading visualisation studios. Collaborative to our core, we partner with the most respected and visionary architects, developers, planners and agencies, to create exceptional ways to help them communicate their ideas and ambitions.
Our purpose is to help our clients visualise a better world, translating great design concepts into beautiful and compelling images, films and visual experiences that engage, inspire, and influence. We explore all the possibilities inherent in a brief, guiding a visual strategy for every stage of a project’s life.
Creative in both ideas and outputs, we are unconstrained by a house style, drawing on our experience to offer the most appropriate visual responses for an individual brief. We are passionate about democratising the built environment and are constantly developing new tools and techniques to support greater participation, inclusive decision making and informed debate.
Hayes Davidson offers wraparound consultancy and visualisation outputs, working in partnership with our clients to advise, guide and deliver the most compelling visuals and narratives to communicate a project.
Across planning, marketing, architectural competitions and design development, we have diverse, expertise within our team, including in-house app developers and real-time rendering experts. We also offer specialist experience in the following:
Creative strategy. Our starting point for any project is asking 'What if...?’ We work collaboratively with clients and design teams to unpick assumptions and workshop fresh ideas to offer unique and innovative solutions and create memorable artwork.
Planning. Pioneers in verified images, we built the methodology that underpins today’s industry standard. We have continued to innovate, combining rigour, precision and accuracy with creativity and new technology. Our specialist planning team, dedicated to analysing the potential visual impact of new city development, has an exceptional track record in supporting major planning applications with view-scoping and early-stage option testing.
Film. As expert storytellers, we use film to create distinctive, experiential project narratives for clients and brands. Our in-house team provides holistic ‘concept to completion’ support from creative strategy to brief refinement, options and storyboarding, art direction and location shoots, and animatics.
Hayes Davidson is a pioneer in visualisation, widely acknowledged as one of the founding forces of our industry. Today, our ensemble team of creative specialists continues to embody our original values of creativity, innovation and fresh thinking established over 30 years ago by our founder and industry leader Alan Davidson.
Our experience, working with the most creative and ambitious clients on some of the world’s most ground-breaking and iconic projects, has given us an unrivalled body of knowledge on which to draw. From BIM to the Metaverse, from the Shard to the Highline, our work over the last 30 years has engaged with the big built environment issues of the day, shaping our understanding and helping define our futures.
As an employee-owned business, teamwork and collaboration are at the heart of everything we do. We actively nurture a studio culture that results in the quality, ingenuity and exceptional service that our clients value. In a supportive, ego-free environment, we are free to explore ideas and focus on the most appropriate and creative solutions for each and every project.
Our people comprise a unique collection of skills and specialisms which we curate, project-by-project, to ensure our clients have the best possible team working alongside them. With an international team and a physical presence on 3 continents, we have fully embraced the potential of remote and hybrid working to offer our clients enhanced flexibility and responsiveness.
Our strong founding values mean that we are committed to a supportive, friendly and inclusive culture, and to helping each and every member of our team reach their full individual potential. For us, a dynamic and collaborative studio is one in which everybody is encouraged to contribute and participate. We like to give something back and support a number of charitable initiatives including Article 25, Open City’s Architecture in Schools programme and HD5K, our annual run to support the work of MNDA. Many of our activities are generated and championed by our team.
As an equal opportunities employer, we are developing EDI initiatives at both studio and industry level to support professional access and training. We also run a paid summer placement programme for interns keen to get their first taste of working on live projects. We promote a good work/life balance and support flexible working.
Our continued success is driven by our passion for creative collaboration, and our desire to expand our networks to embrace new disciplines, new thinking and new approaches. If, like us, you are passionate about what you do and would like to explore the potential of working together, we’d love to hear from you. Please contact our Creative Director David Bullock.
We value the skills and commitment of our team and provide exciting opportunities for personal and professional development at all career stages. We are always on the lookout for fresh perspectives and the next generation of ideas. Please note, as part of our commitment to EDI, Hayes Davidson operates a name-blind recruitment process.
We are always on the lookout for talented freelancers. If you share our passion for great architecture, art and technology, please send your CV and portfolio to hdrecruitment@hayesdavidson.com.
14 May 2024
There has been a distinct shift in the priorities for communicating tall buildings over the last decade.
10 years ago, the emphasis was on square footage, office space, and the speed of elevators getting you to the 60th floor. Now we are seeing a much greater focus on green buildings, well-being, the responsibility to ‘touch the ground lightly’ and contribute to the public realm at street level, and a shift from predominantly commercial to more residential and mixed-use towers. These conversations are taking place not just in London and the UK but globally, in cities like New York, Toronto, Seattle and Miami, and are leading to more creative and innovative collaborations with our clients.
In 2014 the biggest requirement was for contextual views from a distance which would accurately represent the potential impact that a building would make on a city skyline. In London, tall buildings are still being designed to fit into city clusters in line with the London Plan and designated protected views, whereas in New York for example, there is a greater degree of freedom allowing for buildings which are designed to stand out rather than fit in, with bolder, more sculptural designs.
But aesthetics is only part of the picture. An ever-increasing amount of our current work focuses on the ground-level, human experience and how to invite people into a building, highlighting amenities and public realm that will make them feel welcome. More often now, our visualisations are about communicating the potential of a building to a much wider group of stakeholders, beyond just the building users.
That conversation will often start long before planning, helping to inform design decisions, and may require a much more varied range of images, styles and perspectives than before. Using visualisation to open up the dialogue earlier and to a wider group of people means doing things differently and exploring the potential of technology to drive engagement.
To date, the industry has still largely been constrained to the same rigid verified methodology for planning applications, but new technology is giving us the ability to offer an on-street experience of proposed new buildings. At Hayes Davidson, we’ve been developing new tools and apps including HDScope, launched last year, which offers a much greater degree of flexibility and allows us to view proposed tall buildings from anywhere in the city. We're looking at more dynamic ways to visualise future buildings, using 360 video which better illustrates the whole experience rather than just offering a fixed still image.
Storytelling is a crucial part of engaging new and diverse audiences in discussions around the built environment, and showing the potential experiences that a building might offer requires an approach which is more artistic than technical. While tall buildings are now offering more amenities at ground level to invite people in and make them feel welcome, the process of visualising those schemes is also reflecting that deeper level of engagement.
We are currently working on a tall building project in London which will include new public spaces, and have collaborated with our client to create assets for planning which also represent and engage the existing local community. We held a filming day with locals, including them in the conversation about a building which will have a big impact on their day-to-day lives. We are also working on several retrofit projects where we have created AR tools that allow potential tenants to visit the site and see on a 1:1 scale what the refurbished floor plate will look and feel like.
Visualisation has always sat at a fascinating nexus between science and art, with technology now playing a growing role in the democratisation of the built environment and our ability to better communicate with people. We are excited to see what the next 10 years will bring.