Setting it straight

Over the past five or six years we have been at the cutting edge in the bespoke cladding UK market. Our name is mentioned whenever a client or architect is looking for a quality product, whether the project costs £300,000 or £30m. We are working on the Bankside 123 scheme in Southwark Street, London, which sets a new benchmark for quality, safety and technical innovation.

Our scheme for Roche Pharmaceuticals’ HQ in Welwyn, completed last year, won the BCO awards for Best Office Building and is rated as Excellent on the BREEAM sustainability measures.

We have completed schemes with Zaha Hadid, Herzog de Meuron, Nicholas Grimshaw and other leading architects and many of the buildings have gone on to win awards.

Your feature also shows six large projects and asks who will clad them. Well, we have already been appointed to one project, and are in discussions about a second. A third is believed to have been awarded to the cladding company you quoted in your article.

The other projects are so far in early stages of planning, but when the time comes there will be firms like ours which are technically able to deliver cutting-edge architecture. A source in your article suggests that “clients’ needs could be satisfied with less ambitious projects”.

This view is negative and lacks vision and imagination. It may be that clients are best placed to decide for themselves how their needs are met. Such clients will always have firms like Schneider GB Ltd, and others, to turn to.

To put the record straight, I cordially invite Building to visit us and report first hand, rather than rely on third-party reports. I can arrange for your reporter to see our approach from design to production to installation, and to provide a clear view of how the process of delivering bespoke quality facades works.

Stephen Tanno, technical manager, Schneider GB