John Gray joined HTA in 2010 to lead a dedicated team of Architects and Technologists specialising in housing project delivery. John was made a Partner in 2015 and has helped establish HTA’s reputation as a leading practice in the delivery of technically proficient and skilfully executed projects.

John’s Architectural career began with James Stirling & Michael Wilford at a time when drawings were done by hand. He went on to work for a variety of large, multi-disciplinary practices in the UK, Germany, Italy and Singapore. He joined Aukett Associates during the ‘dotcom boom’ and gained a wealth of experience in the fast-moving telecoms infrastructure business. Moving into retail and commercial sectors, he acquired an appreciation of package-based methods of procurement.

 Prior to HTA, John spent 8 years at Ryder Architecture where he was strategically involved in the development of internal systems and QA protocols. He further broadened his scope to include Healthcare and Education sectors in his role as Project Architect on several PFI hospital and BSF schools projects.

At HTA John oversees terms of appointment, scope of services and deliverables. He promotes best practice and drives quality by leading a regime of weekly technical reviews, masterclasses and CPD. He ensures project teams have the appropriate experience and consults with clients to coordinate programmes that work for the wider project team.

HTA tailors its Executive Architect services to suit individual clients’ procurement routes by benchmarking quality standards and developing efficient internal processes. In his role as Head of Delivery, John has advanced a suite of associated design & management services including Lead Consultant and Design Guardian into specialisms highly valued by contractor-developer clients.

John is an advocate of HTA’s role as a ‘Designer in Industry’. Rather than treating the design as a fait accompli, we consider how materials behave with each other and how they might be constructed. We take an interest in components assembled in the factory and their means of transportation. We care about offcuts and waste. And increasingly, we calculate the embodied carbon of the entire process.

HTA has long championed the role of offsite construction to transform the delivery of high-quality housing with improved workmanship and shorter programmes. John is a leading member of HTA’s offsite working group, which continually innovates offsite techniques to bring modular delivery into the mainstream.

John frequently speaks at conferences and roundtable events. He co-authored the Building in Quality Initiative (a joint collaboration between RIBA, RICS & CIOB) which sought to improve built outcomes by promoting risk sharing and incentivising good design as an alternative to short-term transactional approaches to project delivery.