Professor Sir Edmund Happold, Ted to those who knew him, moved between the worlds of engineering and design, breaking down traditional preconceptions, lifting barriers, and uniting people with big-picture thinking to allow true innovation of building design, of education and of society. He was also a highly disciplined engineer and one of great courage, qualities that earned him the respect of the many architects with whom he worked during his life.
His personal gifts of perception and imagination, in engineering and negotiation distinguished his early career to the point where he was leading the prestigious group known as Structures 3 at Ove Arup and Partners. His work on some of the landmark buildings of the time, including Sydney Opera House and the Pompidou Centre, established his reputation as a visionary.
An offer to take the chair at the University of Bath as professor of Architecture and Engineering Design led the way for Ted to start his own practice. In 1976, he founded Buro Happold with a team of seven colleagues who joined him from Arup. After that, there was no looking back. Working alongside international designers and academics, Ted was able to combine the two worlds that truly motivated him. The peculiar Ted blend of academic research feeding directly back into an increasingly high profile practice and driven by a conscience determined to contribute to the greater good of both the built environment and society formed the now, reputed Buro Happold footprint.
Ted held a lifelong passion for lightweight structures and worked on a number of outstanding tensile projects throughout the world during his career. Interaction between the practice and engineering research at the University of Bath was the basis of his ability to innovate. Many of the innovative projects upon which he worked, such as the gridshell for Mannheim with architect Frei Otto, served to influence the design of contemporary projects, such as the award winning Weald and Downland Open Air Museum and the visitor centre for Savill Garden, which opened in June 2006.
Ted believed passionately in integrating different disciplines to create better design solutions. At the University of Bath, he restructured courses so that students from different design disciplines, architecture, building services and structural engineering, rubbed shoulders and studied together because they shared courses. During his 18 years at the University of Bath, Ted taught at least two generations of young architects and engineers the principles of mutual professional respect. In his practice, he soon had multidisciplinary groups combining their knowledge to produce integrated design solutions, thereby creating more elegant, economically attractive and environmentally efficient buildings.
Buro Happold was first set up in fellowship, an organisational structure owing much to Ted's Quaker upbringing. In a statement of intent, Ted wrote:
"Buro Happold is a multi-professional consulting engineering practice. A profession is defined as having a body of knowledge, possessing diagnostic and problem solving techniques and holding an attitude to service which is not just about money, but about working for the public good to a code of professional conduct. Consulting means the practice is for hire. Engineering takes scientific and traditional knowledge of the physical and human environment, together with an understanding of construction methods and the market to join clients, architects, contractors and others in providing solutions to problems. It is about economy and value."
Over the next twenty years, Ted lived by these ideals in his professional engineering design activities, in his role in academia, and as a spokesperson for the construction industry. Building bridges between the worlds of engineering and design, Ted was eventually appointed a Royal Designer for Industry, a member of the Design Council, vice-president of the Royal Society of the Arts, and Master of the Royal Designer for Industry. His vision and initiative drove the founding of the Building Industry Council, later to become the greatly respected Construction Industry Council, the forum through which all professional disciplines in the construction world meet and discuss matters of common interest, as well as providing a nationally recognised, united voice for the industry as a whole.
Ted did all he could to drive home the need for architects and engineers to understand each other. The ripples he created in Bath in 1976 are still felt across the industry today. His ideas have made a great impression upon everyone in the construction industry who are now engaged in designing and realising our built environment, both for pleasure now and as heritage for the future.
Ted’s untimely death on 12 January, 1996 has been a great loss to the construction industry. His inspiration, however, lives on in the University of Bath and within the various design offices of Buro Happold.