From a background working with healthcare specialist Nightingale, the three partners went off to work in different sectors before forming Sonnemann Toon, now a specialist practice itself in healthcare projects. FX talks to Gary Toon.

Founded in 2002, architectural practice Sonnemann Toon is best known for its innovative healthcare architecture, but as Gary Toon, who formed the firm with his wife, architect Cressida Toon and German-born architect Kerstin Sonnemann, explains, a rigorous selection process means practices working in the public sector are often pigeonholed.

'Sonnemann Toon designs mostly acute healthcare, which is a difficult type of architecture,’ he says, ‘but we couldn’t pitch an idea for, say, a school and be confident of winning because we haven’t any previous experience in that area. We’d be weeded out by the selection process before we even got to submit’.

It’s not that Toon doesn’t see the value of experience, rather that he believes the public sector has a tendency to be overly empirical: ‘You need a firm with the right experience’, he says, ‘but I don’t think there’s a need for everyone in a firm to have that same experience. After all, architects are trained as pluralists. If you want to get variety and new ideas, you need to mix that up a bit.’ The firm’s three partners met and became friends while they worked at architectural practice Nightingale Associates, which specialises in healthcare, science and education. A few years later, after they had all left Nightingale Associates – Sonnemann was working on a residential project in west London, Cressida Toon was working with a large American practice in its UK healthcare team, and Gary Toon was working for a London-based fit-out contractor on office and data centres – the time felt right to start up Sonnemann Toon.

Although healthcare is the firm’s specialism, it actually began on small commercial projects while sub-contracting for Nightingale Associates. ‘To a large extent our old employer provided our fledgling practice with a more secure start than might otherwise have been the case,’ explains Toon. ‘From the position of having regular incomes we were able to pitch for new work in the healthcare, commercial and residential sectors.’ This healthy mix feeds the creativity and imagination that Toon says is at the heart of what they do.

So does designing a chocolate shop in Kensington help with designing primary healthcare facilities in London’s East End, for instance? ‘The different disciplines inform one another,’ says Toon. ‘If a commercial client asks for something hardwearing, well, that’s your usual palette in healthcare, and similarly, when there’s a bit of healthcare design that you want to make really different, then experience of the private sector really helps.’ Toon says the public sector is no longer a ‘poor relation’ of the commercial sector. ‘Some of these public buildings are now the biggest shows in town,’ he explains. ‘Naturally, large public buildings get a lot of coverage; lots of people use them and see them.’

On a visit to the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, where his son was born recently, Toon says he was struck by the building ‘not so much because of its architecture, though some people like it more than I do, but you can see that there’s a more human mix of activity in the design. ‘There’s actually a premium coffee shop, for instance, where you might want to drink the coffee. Commercial enterprise [in hospitals] is no longer seen as something dirty – it’s actually let in the front door now.’ Public buildings – especially hospitals – have traditionally suffered from a certain austerity when it comes to design but, as Toon says, this is beginning to change. ‘Aesthetics are definitely being taken more seriously now’, he says. Since the removal in the mid-Eighties of Crown immunity, hospitals have been subject to the same planning restrictions as other buildings. ‘Town planners are, if you like, the eyes of the community, that’s how we have democratically decided that planning should take place. ‘If you want to avoid disastrous planning you need some way of asking the community what would be acceptable, otherwise you are just imposing structures on people,’ he says.

But as Toon knows, the process is not always straightforward. ‘It is a complex, bureaucratic structure. The Government has been trying to alter that, to make some real, systemic changes in planning to try and improve the situation, but the real fact of the matter is that it’s a complicated process.’ The public sector has traditionally been less prone to recession, but despite the Prime Minister’s recent pledge to underwrite PFI (private funding initiatives) for public building, Toon articulates the concerns of many in the industry: ‘What I think is sewing doubt in everybody’s mind is the fact that the Government is propping up the banking sector and it’s propping it up with money it presumably would have spent on other things, not least the public sector. There’s only so much money going round; either you build a hospital or you prop up a bank.’

However, Toon remains enthusiastic about the public sector: ‘The thing that gives me the most joy is, when you go and see an existing facility and you see the appalling conditions in which people are working, then you hit on something that releases space and light and gives them an environment that they previously couldn’t have imagined. I get a lot of satisfaction from that.’ This is just what Sonnemann Toon did with the new entrance to Moorfields Eye Hospital, completed in March 2007. ‘It was created out of a plant room and three or four cellular offices with three-slit windows, and we turned something out that I think is quite distinctive and easy to use – there’s no reminders of what it used to be like,’ says Toon. As Toon points out, that hospital visitors previously had to go up five steps to enter the building is a reminder of the way public-sector buildings can be less than expedient when it comes to design. Thankfully, with practices like Sonnemann Toon on the case, that’s changing.

 

This article was first published in FX Magazine.