Louisa Bowles

Louisa specialises in environmental design and heads the Sustainability Group’s expanding team of dedicated specialists. She has championed the necessity and benefits of sustainable design across the office. She structured our Whole Life Carbon strategy to ensure all projects are measuring and monitoring the balance between embodied carbon and operational energy using our in-house tools including H\B:ERT. Her ambition is to ensure each project performs the best it can based on the site, context, brief and client.

Louisa joined us in 2004 to work on the RIBA award-winning New Biochemistry Building for the University of Oxford. She has since delivered numerous education, community and arts projects including an extension to the Grade II-listed Queen Elizabeth House in Oxford; Aldingbourne Country Centre, an education and training centre for adults with learning difficulties in West Sussex, and Eltham Hill Technology College as part of the London Borough of Greenwich BSF programme.

Her recent project work includes the Urban Sciences Building at Newcastle University and the Biochemistry Completion project, currently on site. The former is an innovative Living Lab providing a new home for the Department of Computing and a variety of sustainability research groups; the latter is a multi-disciplinary research building designed as a research hotel.

An active member in London’s various climate action groups, she is a key research contributor to organisations such as the London Energy Transformation Initiative (LETI) and the Architects’ Climate Action Network (ACAN). She was shortlisted for the Architects’ Journal Sustainability Champion of the Year award in 2020.