Amy Knowles-Brown

Amy joined Anderson Bell + Christie in 2017; since then, her people-centred design approach has had a significant influence on the office’s ability to design health and care projects focussed on dementia friendly design, care facilities for drug rehabilitation, intergenerational housing, and care homes for people with profound disabilities. Amy’s unique, innovative thinking and ability to distil complex briefs and challenging technical requirements have resulted in elegant, resolved designs with people at their heart. Due to her strong leadership skills, Amy has recently been promoted to Team Leader, managing a team of five architects and architectural assistants, overseeing their workload, and providing a sounding board and technical advice to her team. Amy has risen to the role with ease, and her team all admire and appreciate her leadership skills. She also mentors younger, less experienced staff within the office when working towards their Part 3 qualification, who all value Amy’s guidance and substantial experience. Her communication skills foster excellent working relationships with clients, multi-disciplinary design teams and contractors, and her previously employment at a major contractor gives Amy a unique and beneficial insight into both sides of a construction project. Amy has an essential role in the office, working across all our teams to translate early-stage concept designs into robust construction drawings. Her exceptional technical ability and communication skills means that she is often asked to lead on resolving complex technical issues at specific project stages across healthcare, education, residential and refurbishment projects. She fosters engaging discussions with on-site teams to find resolutions quickly, providing much needed reassurance to both the client and the contractor. Never one to shy away from a complex situation, Amy has assisted on numerous projects in the office when a more technical resource is required and is a welcome voice in both design and technical reviews to steer projects in a more holistically developed direction. Outside of AB+C, Amy has undertaken restoration projects on three private homes. From a typical tenement flat restoring original features, to a re-working of a substantial garden flat including structural adjustments to create larger internal spaces, to a two-storey extension to a villa house, Amy’s strong and elegant design abilities have shone, and have improved the condition of each residence substantially. Managing the construction of each project on site with ease, Amy acted as client, architect, and project manager, while never wavering concentration on her projects at AB+C.

Amy has specific skills in the health and care sector, with a portfolio of projects focussed on delivering exemplar accessible buildings for people with disabilities. Many of the building types that Amy has worked on are unique, for clients with extremely specific needs. Because of this she has become expert in collaborative early-stage brief development and robust feasibility studies, which she has developed to support several charities. She is currently working with Capability Scotland on a site appraisal and briefing process for new enabling accommodation for a user group with profound physical and cognitive disabilities where she is developing a bespoke briefing and codesign process focussed on collaborative working with staff and residents in their current facility. Amy has built up considerable experience in the therapeutic design of drug rehabilitation centres, she has worked with Turning Point in Glasgow and most recently with Alternatives in West Dunbartonshire who run a community-based recovery programme. She has worked collaboratively with them to develop concept designs for a pilot care village which will provide a graduated level of care for people recovering from a drug addiction. At the Clydebank Health Centre for NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde – a landmark building signalling the ongoing regeneration of the Queens Quay area – Amy played a significant role in Stage 3, 4 and 5 drawing packs, where she coordinated extensive consultant information to ensure that the consequent construction details were fully resolved. For the award-winning Doune Health Centre, Amy provided technical input into specific dementia friendly design components; she has carried this experience through to a masterplan she has recently delivered at the site of the previous Liberton Hospital for the City of Edinburgh Hospital where she has designed a low carbon, accessible, dementia-friendly neighbourhood on a site with difficult topography. Amy was fundamental in the delivery of three Early Years centres for City of Edinburgh Council, which have all been praised by both practitioners and parents for their design integrating internal and external play spaces, and their functional layout, helping to ease the practitioner’s role by empowering the children to be more independent. Working with two different construction teams across the three projects, each with slight design variations, Amy implemented a set of universal details to create a rational construction pack which helped the projects complete to a tight programme.