John McAslan: Our man in Haiti

John McAslan looks haggard. Is it the rumour that one of his prize projects, the Crossrail station at Bond Street, will be axed in the government’s public spending review? Or perhaps he’s braced, like so many architects, to lay off a swath of staff? It’s neither, he says.

He is stressed because he’s been poring over some 350 entries to a competition for housing in Haiti: McAslan has taken on the immense responsibility of choosing the designs for the bulk of permanent housing to be built for the 1 million Haitians who need homes urgently after January’s earthquake (see factfile, below).

He is frank about the time this is taking. “Too fucking much! That’s why I have tonnes of mouth ulcers and a cold. Don’t get me wrong - I’m honoured and committed - but there’s huge pressure to act fast and so much to do.”

McAslan says the job is taking up a quarter of his time, but 100% of his “headspace”.

Despite this, he has quite a lot going on elsewhere too: as well as Bond Street, he’s doing the dramatic new concourse at King’s Cross, the firm’s biggest and most complex current project. It is worth half a billion pounds in construction costs and stands starkly in the glare of public scrutiny (not a clever project to mess up). So mouth ulcers aside, how is McAslan bearing up?

Financially, he says his practice is doing okay. Although the firm had yet to post its latest results at Companies House at the time of going to press, McAslan predicts turnover of £10.8m for the 120-strong firm in 2010, which will be its highest since it launched in 1996.

In terms of profit, again, McAslan’s work in Haiti, which is paid but non-profit-making, appears to be uppermost in his mind. “I genuinely have no idea,” he says. “I can tell you we aim for a 15-20% profit though.”

Later his PR reveals the firm is forecasting £950,000 in pre-tax profit for this year.

Suggesting he does have at least some idea about finances, McAslan adds: “We have never been in debt.” Neither has the practice, unlike most architects, suffered “major redundancies”, he says. “We’ve always kept things pretty lean.”

That’s not to say he’s impervious to the economic gloom. For a start, the practice works on schools, colleges and universities, potentially exposing it to the fallout from the scrapping of the Building Schools for the Future programme.

“It’s hard, it’s very hard.

Anyone who’s doing anything in architecture right now is doing well,” he says.

But McAslan says the mood in the industry has improved. “There is a nervousness but things always slow down over summer and it doesn’t feel like the black hole of September 2008, so I’m optimistic. We’re even hiring a few students.”

Still, he can’t have missed the speculation surrounding the future - or not - of Bond Street Crossrail station. But he denies the project is under threat: “There was talk that it was at risk but, no, it’s proceeding. It will continue to be scrutinised for costs, of course, and we are being asked to rationalise the design to save costs - for instance, reworking the M&E strategy to save needing a triple basement but that’s what you should be doing anyway.”

As positive as he is about the UK market, the practice is also heavily involved in overseas markets, with a third of its business emanating from outside the UK. Current projects include the $80m Stanislavsky Centre in Moscow, a 600ft2 pair of residential towers in Istanbul and the Cultural Forum, which is part of Qatar’s £3.5bn Heart of Doha project. Is he consciously planning international expansion? Not exactly.

“We’d like to do more in Qatar, particularly in the schools market. But we have a simple view of work: if we get invited to bid for something, we will do. If we get appointed, great, and we’ll then aim to develop that relationship and win more work.”

He admits there are shortcomings with this approach: “Maybe we could have more rigour and aggression, but I would rather start with a relationship than nothing.”

The international market has not always been plain sailing for McAslan, however. Five years ago, the firm attempted to partner with a firm in China and left after it did not get paid. “We didn’t have the right relationships and we didn’t set up proper payment procedures. It’s quite hard to get paid properly in China as you have exchange rate controls and so on to negotiate.”

He has learned some harsh lessons: “Now when we work internationally we try to set up simple payment procedures and we have a good finance team.

But you grow into that and adapt to your experiences. Although, thankfully, I don’t get too involved with that sort of thing.”

As if to prove the point, his thoughts turn back to the mountain of Haiti proposals he’ll be sifting through this weekend.

“The pile is this thick,” he says, with a hand hovering at least a metre over the desk. Doesn’t he mind this distraction from his day job? “Life’s not only about architecture,” he says.