Practice in Profile Supported by
SHEPPARD & ROUT STILL BEARS THE names of its founders David Sheppard and Jonty Rout but now has a new generation of directors, Jasper van der Lingen and Tim Dagg, with a further generation emerging over the past two decades, associate directors Matt Gutsell, Jonathan Kennedy and Steven Orr.
With these transitions over the years to different individuals steering the ship, is there still a discernible consistency of approach? Is there a Sheppard & Rout philosophy and vision that has persisted over time? We certainly like to think so.
Looking back at what we have produced as a practice over the last 40 years is fascinating and instructive, bringing our underlying approach into sharper focus with the benefit of distance.
So where does inspiration come from as your pencil hovers over the intimidatingly blank piece of paper? It can come from anywhere, often unexpected and random: a place inhabited by your own memories, predilections and, of course, the specifics of the project. As David Mitchell suggested many years ago in his superb series The Elegant Shed, inspiration may come from the shape of chewing gum on the sole of your shoe. The point is taken; the spark that sets off a design, the big idea, the parti diagram of minimal lines that sums it all up, can come from anywhere.
For us, it seems to come, inherently, from the place in which we are designing. It involves deep consideration of a place in all its facets – context, environment, the ineffable particular atmosphere that every place has, the history and stories of the region, both fiction and nonfiction, the temporal dimension – the past and
