Livingstone and DfL director vow panel will not interfere in private schemes

Foster + Partners’ Spencer de Grey, Land Securities’ Mike Hussey and Adams Kara Taylor’s Hanif Kara have all been appointed to a new Design for London (DfL) advisory panel.

The group will be chaired by Richard Rogers, and will provide design advice on major projects across London as well as GLA, LDA and TfL schemes.


Richard Rogers
Rogers will head up the Design for London advisory panel

The 12-strong panel also includes:

• Kees Christiaanse, KCAP (architect)

• Alex de Rijke, de Rijke Marsh Morgan (architect)

• Rients Dijkstra, Maxwan (architect)

• David Levitt, Levitt Bernstein Associates (architect)

• Farshid Moussavi, Foreign Office Architects (architect/academic)

• Martha Schwartz, Martha Schwartz Partners (landscape architect)

• Jonathan Smales, Beyond Green (sustainable development consultant)

• Peter St John, Caruso St John Architects (architect)

• June Barnes, East Thames Housing Group (appointee from the London Sustainable Development Commission)

The group will be met with hostility by certain sections of the construction industry, which claim that there are already too many layers of bureaucracy and design review to get through.

Both London mayor Ken Livingstone and DfL director Peter Bishop have vowed that the body would not generally seek to interfere directly in private schemes. In smaller schemes, Bishop said, intervention by DfL would just add an unnecessary bureaucratic hurdle for development.

London mayor Ken Livingstone said London was currently experiencing a 100-year high. He said: “London is a global capital for architecture and Urban Design, and the city has the most exciting and demanding development and regeneration prospects for a hundred years. London deserves the very best that architecture and sustainable design can offer.”