About
Ben Vickery and Paul Hyett have together amassed some 50 years of combined experience in the field of sports, entertainment and event planning and architecture. Prior to setting up their partnership, they held senior roles in two of the world’s leading architectural practices. This afforded them the opportunity to work on some of the best known, largest, and most important facilities around the world, but more than that, it afforded them the opportunity to participate in shaping the venues of tomorrow.
Perhaps more than any other building genre in modern times, the sports venue has enjoyed an unprecedented period of reinvention. From the football grounds of the past, with plenty of atmosphere but few comforts, a new level of expectation was inspired by a series of facilities such as the Emirates, Wembley and AT&T Stadiums. Buildings that offered greater levels of safety, comfort, amenity, functionality and delight.
But such buildings are inevitably more expensive to construct, maintain, and operate than the simpler stands that they so often replaced. By designing to maximise match-day and non-match-day revenues, new stadiums must be able to finance themselves and the clubs that play in them. But designing for the maximum revenue is only part of that process and is anyway contingent on the brief or programme for the project. This is where the experience of Vickery Hyett has been forged, honed, and re-honed. Their experience is dynamic, because as the sporting world and the business of sport responds to better quality and better functioning buildings, so the expectations of fans, players, facility managers and operators continues to grow fueling ever increasing demand for richer and more diverse offerings. This trend is sure to continue and along with developments in new technology, unprecedented health and safety challenges, and changing fashions it will fuel the requirement to keep innovating. Vickery and Hyett’s experience is as closely related to the design and delivery of projects as it is to brief writing and programmatic innovation.
That experience is now available to clients as a ‘high-end’ consultancy offering a complete service from the analysis of existing facilities to brief development, concept design, and procurement advice for new projects. As Employer’s Agent and Advisor, Vickery Hyett will lead clients through the complex process of feasibility assessment, project definition, brief formulation, concept design, team formulation, design development, business case assessment, funding, and finally procurement choice, construction and delivery. And almost unique in our field, we prefer to remain ‘client side’ throughout the entire process with one imperative throughout: the provision of top-class independent professional advice to the facility owner and operator.