Leading UK architectural firm Foster + Partners is to lay off hundreds of its employees due to the weakening property development market. The company, which has designed some of the most famous buildings in the world including London's Gherkin tower, is understood to be making 300-400 staff redundant, about 25% of its total workeforce of 1,300.
Leading UK architectural firm Foster + Partners is to lay off hundreds of its employees due to the weakening property development market. The company, which has designed some of the most famous buildings in the world including London's Gherkin tower, is understood to be making 300-400 staff redundant, about 25% of its total workeforce of 1,300.
The London-based company is also closing its Berlin and Istanbul offices, while displacing staff to new posts in the Middle East where the market has so far proved to be more resilient.
Foster + Partners is not the only architectural firms to announce lay-offs amid worsening market conditions and lack of credit. On the European continent, Rem Koolhaas' OMA has made 50 staff redundant of its total workforce of 300. The move comes after Rotterdam-based architects Erik van Egeraat (EEA) said last week it had named administrators. EEA, which recently was awarded large contracts in Eastern Europe, ran into problems after a number of projects were postponed or scrapped by its clients as a result of the credit crisis. The company, which has 130 employees across its offices in Rotterdam, London, Prague and Moscow, is now eyeing a restart. One of the firm's commissions was for a EUR 4 bn project for the Winter Olympics in Moscow in 2014 - the largest project ever awarded to a Dutch archtiectural firm.
