Lorraine Landels

Apple was famous in the 1990s for giving people job titles like ‘evangelist’. Perhaps it still does. An engineering company could never do that. We could never bring ourselves to use a word so obviously flippant as evangelist, but we might have someone doing that job. In Buro Happold her name is Lorraine Landels.

An evangelist is not about telling people what we do or how we do it (we have a website for that). It is about telling people why we do things and, in doing so, finding common cause with people who might want to do things for similar reasons; making a difference, pushing the boundaries, bringing delight, pushing ourselves.

It helps that Lorraine has spent a lifetime in the industry and has done most of the jobs of the built environment professional, from designing buildings to designing brochures and that she has done it so well and enjoyed it so much that she has become acquainted with most of the industry in the process.

But that is just preparation for what she does now. Joining the dots (and adding something in the process) between what she knows about clients, design team partners and ourselves is much more challenging.

Her focus is not on one project at a time but on a myriad. To do this well, she needs to know a little bit about everything and to be able to see the potential in the idea and the people. These are refined skills, and it helps keeps us, as a firm, focused on why we do things and why we value the people with whom we work.