He's designed rail links in Taiwan and skyscrapers in Hong Kong, so what's Architect Ian Butler doing back in Manchester? Ross MacMillan scales the city's skyline to find out.

IAN BUTLER is sitting 27-storeys up in the Manchester skyline in Sheppard Robson’s recently relocated offices in Piccadilly Gardens.

It is late on a Thursday afternoon and most of the office’s 60 staff have hit 5pm mode, shuffling papers into piles on their desks and staring vacantly at their Apple Macs.

But Butler is still busy on the phone chasing leads: “How many rooms?” he enquires. “What are the dimensions, how tall, how wide?”

The City Tower is one of the tallest office blocks in Manchester. Clad in a green tinted reflective glass, the 28-storey 1960s tower block went under refurbishment in 2005.

Sheppard Robson designed the interior fitout of the 27th floor and it is now a densely white, open-plan office divided into rows of workstations. It is reminiscent of a big Sudoku grid.

The elder statesman
At 54, Doncaster-born Butler appears the elder statesman of the practice. He spent 12 years in Hong Kong with architect RMJM before joining Sheppard Robson in 2005 as managing partner, heading up its Manchester operation.

Commanding a professional reverence as he saunters across the room, Butler conveys an initial likeness to newscaster Jon Snow.

“He’s got a great rapport with the staff,” says practice partner, Fraser Rae.

Rae, who is a lead partner at Sheppard Robson’s new Glasgow office, says Butler understands what it means to deliver projects on a big scale. “His experiences of running the office in Hong Kong and of running a separate office as part of a large group were a huge lure for the practice.”

We liaise in an empty conference room at the back of the office. Lean and tall with a weathered face, Butler conveys the image of the seasoned architect.

He tells me he is enthusiastic about the current crop of young architects at the Manchester office, but knows the difficulty of retaining their services from the pull of the capital.

“I did it myself when I was a youngster,” he says.

Finishing his architecture diploma at the University of Westminster, Butler started out at the then Llewellyn Davies, before moving on to Aedas and RMJM, where he was based mostly overseas.

But times have changed and Manchester is now an exciting city to be for an architect, he says.

The residential boom that has seen apartment blocks dent the city’s skyline has waned, he says. “I think Manchester has pretty much stopped city centre residential now – they’ve decided there’s enough coming through.” Butler, who himself lives in Manchester’s city centre thinks city living is a good thing.

When you’ve lived in a city centre that never stops like I’ve done in Hong Kong, it’s great. Cities should have people living in the middle, that’s how it should be.”

He admits that while the credit crunch has created a “shaky” commercial market, he is confident that it is a mere ripple along the surface.

The practice has long been associated with the Allied London development of Spinningfields, Manchester’s new financial district, which began development in early 2000.

The practice has already designed the new customer facing building for Royal Bank of Scotland and has two projects under construction there at the moment, says Butler.

Three Hardman Street, is one of four major office buildings that will make Hardman Square a focal point of Spinningfields. Due for completion in 2008, the £83m building is conceived as a series of four stepping blocks rising from 11 to 14 storeys.

Fashion and engineering
Butler says the UK’s buoyant construction market is giving architects greater freedom over their designs. “I don’t think in this climate any of our clients are just looking at the cheapest architect,” he says. “They are looking for a team of people that are enthusiastic, creative and can produce a design that’s got the wow factor or the inventiveness factor.”

But Butler recalls a period where UK architects were struggling to make ends meet.

He left the UK in 1991 to head up RMJM’s Hong Kong operation, turning his back on a country in deep recession. “It was survival time really for architects in the UK,” he reflects. “We’d gone through a recession so there wasn’t much building going on, and if it was, it was small-scale.”

In Hong Kong, Butler designed several highrise multi tower schemes of up to 11,000 units and led RMJM into several higher education masterplans. “They look to international architects as providing something different so you tend to get the higher profile developments,” he explains. “Often an international architect is used as a marketing tool to help them sell the scheme to their customers.”

Does he miss the scales to which he was designing? “I miss them a little,” he says, his face screwed up in indecision. “Some of the 20-storey high-rises we’re doing in Manchester would be called midrise in Hong Kong.

“When I first went to Hong Kong it was like the UK is now. It had undergone 15 years of growth and I thought it would carry on forever. I managed to get seven years of that growth and then in 1998 it changed dramatically.”

In 1998 an economic crash crippled much of Asia. House prices were slashed by 50% all over the region, Butler recalls. “Now of course it’s on its way up again and Shanghai has taken over as the big growth area.”

The economic downturn of the Far East prompted RMJM to call for Butler’s experience back in London. “Ever since the recession, I was having requests saying that there were greater opportunities back home. I eventually came back in 2003 so there was a professional push in addition to my oldest son entering into his GCSEs.”

Butler’s later decision to leave RMJM was on principle as the practice was heading in a direction that no longer suited him. He is coy about his parting, but adamant about his principles as an  architect.

“If you want to retain creative people you have to give them the feeling that their efforts are going to be rewarded by money and ownership of the business,” he says. “If you bring in an external owner I don’t think it works. I couldn’t work for one of these stock-listed companies. Not in our business, in engineering possibly, but architecture’s different, we’re somewhere in between fashion and engineering. We’ve got to retain that independence of thought.”

After settling in London for less than 12 months on his return, Butler was headhunted by acquaintances at Sheppard Robson for the position in Manchester. “It had been very successful in a very short period of time,” he says. “They needed to carry on with that in a very stable way. I empathised with the direction they were going in terms of the design-led approach.”

A place called home
Butler says it was great to finally get the opportunity to work in the north. He recalls fondly the architecture surrounding his family home growing up in Doncaster. “There are two very interesting buildings,” he muses. “One is the Mansion House – one of only four surviving civic Mansion Houses in the country – and the 1970s Corn Exchange building, now refurbished after a serious fire. It is a very quirky stone building with lots of steel work inside.” Does he get the chance to return home much? Like their dad, Butler’s children are being brought up in Doncaster. “I take my son to all Doncaster Rovers’ home matches on Saturday afternoons,” he says. “When I was a kid I used to go and watch and collect the players’ autographs.”

Family is clearly Butler’s devoted passion. Despite being afforded the luxury of travelling with his profession, his children have always guided his commitments.

When he was transferred in 1991, his eldest son was just two. “He was young enough not to feel the full force of making new friends and leaving old ones behind,” says Butler. His decision to return to the UK was also pre-empted by his children entering their GCSEs at school. “They’ve all spent considerable time in Hong Kong,” he says proudly. “It has given them confidence and another way of looking at things.”

As Sheppard Robson begins to enter its eighth decade, the three offices in London, Manchester and Glasgow will be competing for contracts all over the world. Already carrying out residential schemes for Thames Gateway, and weighing up designs for Glasgow’s east end on the back its commonwealth success, the practice has also been involved in one bid in China recently. “Overseas is a big potential market for us,” says Butler. “But it’s not active enough for us at the moment. We realise the boom in England can’t last forever.”

As Butler picks up his keys and makes his way down to reception to meet a friend for dinner in the city, you get the feeling that for Ian Butler, the busy hum of city life breeds a sweet sense of security and familiarity. “Street level life is crucial for any good city,” I recall him saying earlier. And if Manchester can continue to satisfy Butler’s passion for architecture, it will be a match made in high heaven.