more about Philip Kassanis

CAREER THEMES

Critical approach to each project

Although phases of his career have tended to focus on a particular sector, Philip has never sought to become a sector specialist because it would be too constricting for a free-ranging thinker.

This translates into an approach based on enquiry rather than reliance on sector-specific knowledge, which can always be referenced as necessary.

Client's benefit because Philip brings the full weight of analytical and creative thinking to each project thus avoiding the tendency among some sector specialists to "cut and paste" solutions or just refer to the good practice manual.

Expanding horizons

These abilities enabled the firms who Philip worked for to broaden their portfolios.

This enabled a general health buildings practice to include specialist mental health facilities; a supermarket specialist to embrace a HQ cum factory building for Nokia; a logistics sector practice to tackle the shell & fitout work for the new HQ cum production facility for Pizza Express ; a retail specialist to undertake logistics sector buildings, masterplanning projects, and overseas work.

More recently, during his time at Kassanis+Thomas (read more), it underpinned the firm's ability to be involved in airport masterplanning, overseas regeneration projects, workplace innovation, Crossrail 2 station/masterplanning, college buildings and campus masterplanning, climate change research funded by Innovate UK.

At Open Urbanism these traits led to the development of two innovative initiatives based on masterplanning to the point of being ready to pilot read more .