OUR SERVICES

Helping you deliver excellent, collaborative and cost effective urban design solutions for your projects, stakeholders and prospective clients

01.

URBAN DESIGN ADVICE

Gareth's experience makes him an ideal advisor on Boards, Panels, Committees, Audits groups and design Task forces, creating the conditions for good design and helping review briefs and Terms of Reference. There are few issues he hasn’t experienced and his period in Government has exposed him to many problems, solutions and lessons regarding risks and opportunities around safety, cost, time and quality pressures and delivering on Government priorities.

02.

DESIGN REVIEW

As a practical hands on design director and former practitioner and reviewer of hundreds of projects around the state, Gareth can provide advice on practical, cost effective, attractive design and how it can be achieved. His pioneering work on integrating Country into design and engineering and subsequent award winning projects like Sydney Gateway can help teams get to solutions and avoid prevarication.

03.

VISUAL ASSESSMENT & STRATEGIC DESIGN GUIDANCE

High level design strategies, preliminary visual impact studies, options assessments to influence concepts and environmental assessment - in succinct words and images.

GCDA knows being on site, experiencing the landscape and built fabric and how people use it, is essential to good outcomes. Translating that reality into design strategies using authentic unique words, sketches and photographs is important to reassure communities that it is a human expert doing the work!

04.

URBAN DESIGN TRAINING

Ensuring teams understand the simplicity of good design and are confident in their knowledge of urban design policy is vital. Gareth has trained engineers and designers over many decades and demonstrated what urban design is and what it isn’t. This is so important in today’s vast collection of policy.

05.

GUIDELINE FORMULATION & DEVELOPMENT

Gareth has developed, written or co-written many guidelines over the years to solve problems and provide direction and can help create your guidelines or suites of guidelines. These include Bridge Aesthetics with the Government Architect, the Guideline for Landscape Character & Visual Impact assessment, the Landscape Guideline, the Shotcrete Guideline, DoRAS with TfNSW, the Pacific Highway Urban Design Framework, the Noise Wall Guideline Beyond the Pavement with Raeburn Chapman.

06.

URBAN DESIGN AUDITS & INVESTIGATIONS

Experience is needed to explore, investigate and resolve design problems such as shotcrete overreliance, mulch contamination and non-delivery of design requirements in contracts. GCDA can offer reviews of projects (good or poor), issues can be explored and delicately reported on. A range of colleagues and experts can be called upon to help.

“nothing important in a city can change without an alignment of politics, finance, and design.”