Tony McGuirk is an architect and urban designer, and chairman of BDP.  Tony’s work spans projects which look to interlink learning with living to create new communities.

From 1992 to 2004 he masterplanned the St Peter’s Campus at the University of Sunderland on a disused shipyard on the River Wear. This new place of learning forms the centrepiece of a new city quarter and has been key to Sunderland’s regeneration following the closure of the shipbuilding industry in 1990.  The design creates a new piece of the city with streets and urban spaces linking down to the city’s riverside. All faculty buildings are open to the public and the University library, cafes and restaurants are also open for use by the local people. The project has won 2 RIBA Awards, 2 Civic Trust Awards and a Sunday Times/Royal Fine Arts Commission Building of the Year Award in 1995.

Tony led the design team that won the competition for the central area housing for a new sustainable living quarter in the city of Den Bosch in Eastern Holland. Realised between 2003-2006 and named ‘Armada’, the project won the prize for the people’s favourite building, ‘Publieksprijs’, in Holland in 2004. The design creates a new model for mid-rise city living with vertical wintergarden access, affording dual and triple aspect dwellings and multi level social spaces for neighbours and families. The housing utilises ground water, rejected heat from contiguous buildings and solar power as sources of energy for dwellings and communal spaces.

Tony originated BDP’s vertical urban schools idea, which has become a hallmark of the practice’s work in education over the past decade. It began with the design of Hampden Gurney School and Housing whose novel design was started in 1994 but only realised in 2001. The school, which forms the cornerpiece to a Marylebone city block, has teaching space and play decks on 5 levels, with children growing up the school from nursery at ground to year 6 on top. The school won an RIBA Award and Civic Trust Award in 2002 and was nominated for the Stirling Prize in the same year. The design idea led to BDP’s ‘Beehive School’ design commission as part of the DfES initiative for exemplar schools in 2004. The first of these has now been realised in Devonshire School in Blackpool, which won an RIBA Award in 2007. This model has been taken a stage further in the design of the Bridge Academy in the London Borough of Hackney,  housing 1150 pupils aged from 11-18. Tony’s studio in London has also designed the ‘school under hill’ at Redland Green in Bristol, as well as Marlowe Academy in Ramsgate, an RIBA Award winner in 2007.

Tony has led masterplans and building designs for a variety of universities, including the Universities of Cambridge, York, Limerick, Edinburgh’s Napier University and London South Bank University. He is presently designing a masterplan for a new National College for the island of Malta on a dockyard site in the city of Valetta.  One of the most socially progressive projects to date is the competition winning masterplan for the Crumlin Road in Belfast. The plan draws together the divided sectarian communities in a new living and learning city quarter, formed from the vacated Girdwood Army Barracks and the adjacent disused Crumlin Road Gaol. 

At the commencement of his architectural life, Tony worked with Ralph Erskine on the Byker Housing Project in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, re-housing and renewing a community of 12,000 people working in the shipyards of Tyneside. Byker was awarded Grade II listed status in 2007.