James Reed

James Reed is Project Director at SDE, responsible for getting projects delivered: what the design team is doing, in what order, and whether it will be issued in time to be built.

His background is in the later and more detailed design stages, where the drawings stop being a proposal and start being an instruction, and in the coordinated BIM environment those stages are delivered in. He works backwards from the construction programme — what has to be fixed before something else can start, what can safely stay open, and what will hold up a package if it is not resolved this week — and sequences design teams accordingly. He has done this on both large teams and small ones, and against dates that did not move.

He has been lead designer and design team coordinator on luxury residential schemes, district energy centres, infrastructure and planning work, NHS and private healthcare projects including critical care and radiotherapy environments, and higher education buildings.

He balances design against construction rather than treating them as separate problems: a solution that is elegant on the model and awkward on site has not been finished. Where an efficient answer costs something elsewhere in the building, that trade is put to the client as a decision rather than absorbed quietly into the design.

He is a Certified Passivhaus Designer and was project director on a UK hotel developed to the Passivhaus standard — a building type for which the standard's residential defaults had to be reconstructed. He also leads SDE's work on design automation, including how an engineer discharges a duty of competence over a calculation they did not perform by hand.