Winner | The Chartered Architectural Technologist of the Year Award

Winner

Claire Raftery MCIAT, Chartered Architectural Technologist

Words by John Heaney MCIAT, Chartered Architectural Technologist

Claire is an outstanding Chartered Architectural Technologist. She applies the technology of architecture to her role with passion and pragmatism. Not only has her creativity, innovative approach and technical prowess, combined with a sound business acumen, shot her into a leading role in her short career; she has played a pivotal part in placing ECD Architects as industry leaders in the retrofit and fire remediation sector, as well as being an AJ100 practice for the last 2 years and receiving nominations as Architectural Practice of the Year in the Building Magazine Awards. Well respected by clients, consultants and colleagues, Claire has established a foothold within the industry, presenting her experience throughout the industry.

Claire currently works as an Associate Director at ECD Architects, with responsibilities for managing a team, managing projects and manging clients. ECD is an architectural practice with offices in central London, Glasgow and Preston, with the London office, where Claire is based, working predominantly on social housing. Claire has particularly cultivated her skills in fire remediation work and retrofit; projects that leave residents safer and warmer in their homes, benefitting society at large. The practice is part of a larger group of companies called the N-able Group, and Claire has made strong connections throughout the group, learning from and sharing knowledge with project managers, fire specialists and Principal Designers.

A wide range of skills are required in Claire’s current role. She oversees several large projects, ensuring staff have the information they need, are appropriately resourced and working efficiently. Meanwhile she helps clients to formulate their briefs and subsequently to meet these, keeping them updated with projects’ development. This guiding role allows her to exercise her creativity, solving the complex requirements of existing buildings in imaginative and innovative ways, while ensuring they meet regulatory requirements. She is also involved in the financial monitoring and planning of projects, integrating her understanding of how projects are likely to be delivered with the resourcing of the team. Her responsibility to the team extends to line managing other staff, ensuring they’re enabled to flourish and helping to solve challenges that they face in the office. While her technical skill is a key part of her rise within the practice, her personable nature and caring attitude are key to her success with both staff and clients. Given her integral role in the practice, Claire is also involved in the practice’s management. Her skill in strategic thinking sees her making useful contributions in meetings, proposing more efficient ways of working and perceiving potential challenges and finding solutions for them.

Claire’s commitment to her work is evident in her proactive approach to collaboration and data management. One of her many successful projects was her first project as a junior Technologist: a 22-storey recladding of Denning Point in London for East End Homes, where Claire worked with her team and the ECD BIM team to improve data organisation, sharing, and visualisation. Her leadership of the Retrofit Working Group ensures best practices are shared across the N-able Group. This initiative emerged from Claire’s work on 302 councilowned homes on the Netherfield Estate in Milton Keynes, funded through SHDF Wave 1, and 381 properties funded through SHDF Wave 2.1.

Claire worked with Haringey Council on the design of ‘whole house’ retrofit works for up to 300 homes on the Coldfall Estate. The designs are based on dwelling assessments for each property, adhering to the PAS2035 compliance route. The homes are predominantly twostorey terrace properties, built in the same pre-war era, with a mix of external wall and roofing finishes. Whilst most homes are on the Coldfall Estate, there are 71 additional properties scattered across the borough. Claire believes Architectural Technologists should drive the push for cost-effective, low-energy designs to help deliver the most sustainable homes for Haringey. She led the team to develop designs that are adaptable for future use, addressing both carbon impact and lifecycle costs.

Working with Thanet District Council on five existing residential tower blocks in Margate and Ramsgate, Claire has supported the Client’s aspirations to improve the towers’ residents’ safety and addressing their cost of living, whilst contributing to the Council’s commitment to support Kent County Council’s 2050 net zero targets. The project was the first in the practice to take advantage of two streaming funds (both the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund (SHDF) and the Building Safety Fund (BSF)) to achieve these aspirations within the Council’s tight budget constraints. Design quality to the local area was also a key part of the Client’s brief, and this was achieved through material choices which provide texture and contemporary detailing to the tower blocks.

The depth and breadth of an Architectural Technologist’s expertise was at the fore in the Thanet Towers project. Innovative technical detailing and high design quality, combined with a strong focus of on community involvement with a series of resident engagement days. Working with the Client at the early stages, and then with Contractor in delivery, has been both a success for the project, and also underlines Claire’s capabilities at all stages of a project. Claire also emphasises the importance of education in sustainability, and has presented at conferences and industry workshops, as well as internal Knowledge Cafés, on these topics and more.

Collaboration is central to the way Claire works and how she delivers on her aspiration. She takes what she learns from projects and finds ways to maximise their impact by working with others to increase efficiency and improve outcomes. As the scale of retrofit projects in the practice has grown, so has the amount of data to be managed. Perceiving the potential for better data management, Claire has worked with those on her team delivering projects and with the practice’s BIM team to find ways to organise, share and visualise data. This reduces the chance of errors, and means staff spend less time on repetitive tasks. Meanwhile there are opportunities to see patterns within the data visualisation. For example, this might allow a contractor to use the same specification across a wider range of properties, saving money, allowing more homes to be retrofitted for the same cost. Claire also leads the Retrofit Working Group, gathering experience from across the N-able Group and ensuring that best practice is shared. She always listens to the various stakeholder viewpoints and negotiates the challenges that arise from different parties working on different aspects of the same projects. She provides clear actions on how these can be solved effectively, ensuring harmonious and efficient outcomes.

To ensure that sustainability is kept on the agenda, Claire believes Architectural Technologists should be pushing the performance of their designs to be both cost effective and low energy. Architectural Technologists are in a unique position to further advance the sustainable building agenda within the construction industry. With a foundation of exploring and understanding technical building solutions Architectural Technologists can help to upskill the building industry to deliver viable Net Zero schemes. Within the sustainability sector, one of the greatest challenges is producing low energy design that meets the clients budget expectations. Often a project will start out with loose sustainability targets such as ‘Passive house principals’ or ‘Part L plus’ and these then get watered down further when the project budget is stretched.

Claire is generous in sharing her knowledge and experience both within and outside the practice. She has spoken about the practice’s large scale retrofit work at an Architects Climate Action Network (ACAN) event, inspiring younger architects and technologists that retrofit is a real, tangible route to addressing the climate crisis, as well as fuel poverty. As a contributor to the Social Housing Retrofit Accelerator she also spoke to social housing providers looking to retrofit their stock under the Social Housing Decarbonisation Fund. She provided webinars giving technical answers to the challenges these clients faced, again helping them see that large-scale retrofit is not just a theoreticalpossibility, but is being delivered in practice at homes across the country.

While this encouragement is key, for many potential retrofit designers the confidence to get started on retrofit projects is best gained through specific learning. ECD were the lead contributors to The Retrofit Academy’s Retrofit Designer course that will help to give this confidence. Claire’s module on Large Scale Retrofit gathered her learnings from the preceding years’ work, helping others to realise retrofit projects of hundreds of homes at a time, in a safe way without unintended consequences. It touches on resident engagement, health and safety, surveying, data management and property ownership, all with the focus of delivering better homes.

Claire’s view is that Architectural Technologists are in a unique position to further advance the sustainable building agenda within the construction industry. With a foundation of exploring and understanding technical building solutions, Architectural Technologists can help to upskill the building industry to deliver viable Net Zero schemes. To ensure that sustainability is kept on the agenda, Architectural Technologists should be pushing the performance of their designs to be both cost effective and low energy.