Ioannis Gkikas explained why a structural engineering firm built a façade team, and why treating the whole building envelope as a single, early-stage problem is where the value sits.
Gkikas began with the firm’s own shape. AKT II is an international engineering practice marking thirty years, rooted in structural engineering; its Envelopes team is younger, formed around eleven years ago. It was born, he said, from the structural side, clients kept asking why a firm that understood how buildings stand up didn’t also do their façades.
The name is deliberate. “Envelopes,” not “façades,” because the team takes on the whole shell of a building rather than just its vertical faces. Gkikas described AKT II as an integrated, interdisciplinary company that works “like a swarm, like bees working together in one unity”: the façade engineers coordinating with the computational team on parametric design, with CAD technicians on 3D modelling, and with the bioclimatics team on environmental performance.
The pitch underneath is early involvement. Façades, he argued, start at concept design, and UK clients increasingly understand that, bringing the envelope team on board early to produce the performance and visual studies, and the physical mockups, that de-risk a design before it is committed. He pointed to the Ismaili Centre in Houston as a case where that early modelling and mock-up work shaped the outcome.
The portfolio is mostly British, around seventy per cent of the façade work is in London, across commercial high-rise, residential, hotels and offices, with a growing international list: the Houston centre, the Museum of Art in Las Vegas, the Silk Towers in Batumi with Kengo Kuma, and a resort in the Red Sea’s Ummahat Islands. Retrofit and adaptive reuse ran through it too, among the projects, a 1963 modernist, Grade II-listed tower being converted from offices into homes.
He closed on where the discipline is heading in the UK: competency under the Building Safety Act, and the sharper onus it puts on the envelope, the need to make and defend judgements about materials and methods of construction. That, and the throughline of the talk’s title, from concept to compliance: aligning design intent with engineering, cost and buildability across the stages of the RIBA plan of work, and understanding local construction methods rather than importing assumptions.