Crafts Council Gallery, Waterloo Place, London, 1980-1981. The scheme for a new gallery and information centre involved the refurbishment and conversion of adjoining buildings into one gallery building. The gallery space had to be capable of subdivision into three separate areas. Other requirements included a a public information and coffee area and office, storage, workshop and conference facilities.

The ground-floor levels of the two buildings were unequal, although the mezzanine areas were the same. By re-positioning the main entrance between the two premises and lowering the level of the door and reception area, a new entry ramp was formed. This new feature generated the main architectural strategy of the building - a central circulation axis from the entrance to the stair crossed by a cranked minor axis through the two major gallery spaces.The entrance axis orientated the public on the gallery floor and also lead them towards the staircase up to the mezzanine information centre.

Construction Partners:
Client: Crafts Council

Digital Computer Centre, for Digital Equipment Company, Reading, 1979-1981. In June 1979, Terry Farrell was commissioned to carry out a feasibility study for the use of a speculatively built industrial shed on which Digital Equipment Company had taken out a long lease. The adapted building inverted the traditional concern for the external skin of industrial architecture as the shell already existed. Instead, Farrell focused on providing a series of independent objects within the shell that could be built with minimum interruption to the existing building, at the least cost, and greatest speed.

The final building used an open-plan solution on two levels. The decision was taken to insert a long thin mezzanine inside which was structurally independent from the existing building shell. Adapting to a low budget, much of which had to be spent on services and the computer room, it was this mezzanine that became the focus of the identity of the building. The heating system was suspended from the balustrade of the mezzanine, in prime view. It was painted lilac blue, with the enclosing walls painted in various shades of harmonious grey. Pairs of heating units were hung from the roof, with the fresh air ducts and flues cutting through the roof. Either side of the heater assemblies were vertical connectors to the horizontal balustrade ducts. These formed processional archways to the mezzanine, penetrated by the stairs and bridge.

Construction Partners:
Quantity Surveyor: Michael F Edwards and Associates

In 2011 Farrells produced a series of initial strategies and a masterplan for a residential development on the Dissington Estate and adjoining Birney Hall just outside of Ponteland. Its principles were based on that of the 'eco town', or 'green village,' principles of the Bicester masterplan.

Project Partners:
Consultants: Wardell Armstrong

Juma Al Majid Centre for Culture and Heritage, Dubai, 1993-1995.

This design was a winning competition entry for a centre for culture and heritage in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. In the final design the complex comprised of a number of linked buildings and spaces. The choice of tree-like structure on the roof aimed to create the impression of a library garden and oasis, whilst the central courtyard was designed as an external landscaped room. The eventual building project was not executed.

In 2005, Farrells produced a masterplan of the area for Groveworld. However the site sat dormant for 3 years until Mount Anvil took over ownership and reappointed Farrells as architects to redesign the Eagle House office block at City Road, and transform it into residential accommodation.

Archive material predominantly focuses on the masterplan and client correspondence with Grovesworld.

The Earls Court Masterplan, created approximately 2010, created four villages and a high street as the main place-making concept for the site. The four ‘villages’ were Earls Court, West Brompton, North End and West Kensington. In the masterplan Terry Farrell and Partners proposed a north-south orientation for the 21st century high street. This changed to an east-west orientation at a later masterplan concept stage, from North End Road to the east to Earls Court Station in the West. As part of this change Broadway was proposed as the main north-south route running through the site. For this reason, some of the design sketches are branded “BW” (not to be confused with Bluewater).

Construction Partners:
Architects: Birds Portchmouth Russum; Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates; Pilbrow and Partners; Patel Taylor
Engineers: Arup
Design and Planning: Cityscape Digital Ltd
Planning Consultancy: DP9

In 1994/1995, Terry Farrell & Company submitted a scheme for an addition to a series of converted Robert Adam townhouses in Charlotte Square, with the aim to provide speculative office accommodation. The scheme, developed for Scottish Widows, proposed retaining numbers 15-17 Charlotte Square in their entirety, but to replace the buildings in the ‘backland’ behind the townhouses with a new grouping of low rise-office blocks and a basement carpark. These were of the same massing as the existing buildings and were to be joined to the townhouses by a new glass link. The areas around the new buildings were to be landscaped, and the interior and exterior of the original buildings cleared of accretions and restored (including the reinstating of the original roofscape). Inside the building units the plan allowed for a number of letting arrangements, with the new building linked to numbers 15 and 16, and 17 remained a self-contained unit.

Construction Partners:
Client: Scottish Widows Fund and Life Assurance Society
Engineer: The Carl Fisher Sibbald Partnership; KJ Tait and Associates
Quantity Surveyor: CBA

Conference Square is a triangular plaza which forms the main public space outside the Edinburgh International Conference Centre. The square was included as part of the masterplanned Exchange District in the west end of the city and was developed from 1989-1995.

Construction Partners:
Engineering Consultant: Arup

In 1995 Terry Farrell & Partners won a limited competition to adapt an early 19th Century orphanage in Edinburgh to accommodate a gallery for the work of Eduardo Paolozzi and a new headquarters for the National Galleries of Scotland The project ran from 1995-1999. The original Grade 1 Neo-classical building was designed by Thomas Hamilton and completed in 1833. Farrell’s scheme proposed that office spaces be accommodated in the wings with the Baroque towers, the piano nobile (first floor of principal rooms), and top floor given over to the principal gallery spaces. The scheme recommended that the original interiors be restored and, apart from new services, building interventions kept to a minimum. The gallery was opened in 1999, opposite its sister gallery, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. In 2011 the buildings were renamed Modern Art Two and Modern Art One respectively.

Farrell’s approach was to ‘immerse himself in the spirit of the period’, drawing on Soane and his museum as a ‘fitting connection for a building that relishes its domestic scale and seeks to reject the cleanliness of a conventional contemporary art gallery’. The main intervention was to remove a small section of floor to create a double height space at the centre of the building on an axis with the entrance, forming a ‘great hall’. An upper level gallery through this space joined together the formerly unconnected wings. The ground floor corridor, blocked off during late Victorian alterations was reinstated as the heart of the new public space.

There was also an expansion of the project to include the landscape of the new gallery, that of the adjacent Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and other local landscape amenities. It was Terry Farrell’s proposal to locate a Landform in the northern part of the lawn of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and Charles Jencks, having completed two Landforms at his home in Dumfries, was invited to create a design for this in collaboration with Terry Farrell and Partners. The opening of the Landform took place on 1 August 2002.

Construction Partners:
Engineering Consultants: Will Rudd Associates
Building Consultants: Thomas and Adamson
Main Contractor: Hall and Towse Scotland