10 year anniversary celebration of the Fetal Medicine Research Institute

In 2011 George Petrides (A21architects) was commissioned by Professor Kypros Nicolaides (The Fetal Medicine Foundation) to design the Fetal Medicine Research Institute. In September 2015 we got together again at the Fetal Medicine Research Institute to celebrate 10 years since construction. At this event a plaque was presented honoring George and Kypros' combined vision required to achieve such a striking and visionary building.

George & Kypros both gave short talks at the event reminiscing on the process that was gone through to achieve the project, we have transcribed these below.

George Petrides and Professor Kypros Nicolaides at the Fetal Medicine Research Instutute 10 year anniversary event

Transcription

George Petrides,  Architect

Because you are all my friends, people that I work with, and other members that I value very, very highly. I am not a skilled speaker in any way whatsoever. And I do wish to thank Kypros for trying to help me.

Because without him, obviously, this building wouldn't exist. He questioned everything. He wanted a rational explanation as to why we would do anything.

And sometimes it would take six or eight hours to discuss something to the point of agreement. Otherwise, it wouldn't be possible to move forward. However, he did allow freedom of design.

 It was crucial because there were so many elements involved in the design process.

Central Atrium Lower Ground Floor

And it was very hard to isolate items for a rational discussion. In many ways, the arches that you see outside, they do have a representational element to them. 

But they have actually more than that. They announced the separation between the new building and the old buildings, which are the Victorian houses on Main Road. They announced it in the same way as the Parthenon building did, with the Doric columns, but without a pediment. 

These are Doric columns, if you like, that don't have a pediment above them. It's a sculpture and nothing else. Nevertheless, they create a rhythm. 

Just like a column creates a nice rhythm when you arrive at the building, these arches create a rhythm as well. And in the same way as a Doric column has an emphasis, so it's shaped to exaggerate the perspective, these columns do exactly the same thing. I must have spent at least three months shaping, getting the right shape of these arches. 

They can't deliver a huge amount at the very top of the building. They can't deliver something like 10 metres beyond. And you can imagine, with the heavy wind, how much movement is incurred.

George Petrides presenting in the Lecture Theatre

Obviously, it's a building that you wouldn't design for any other client other than Kypros, because it's bound to fail in a number of details. We did have some water ingress where the arches are literally just within the glass, because we had to analyse how much movement there was involved in it. And you can't anticipate everything when you're a designer.

And I believe the building works. The building is beautifully looked after by Konstantinos, and I'm ever so grateful because every time I come to this building, I can't believe that it wasn't finished yesterday. It's just so beautifully maintained. 

Thank you very much for that. And his dear wife always gives me a big hug and appreciates this building and that gives me a lot of pleasure. One of the other important elements of the building is that when you go into any hospital, including ones that are presently being built by famous British architects, is that they give away, architects give away the role of their services engineer and the structural engineer, and they give them a free hand.

Professor Kypros Nicolaides welcoming remarks in the Central Atrium

And because of my personal interest in the field of architecture, there's no way I would have allowed a structural engineer or a services engineer any freedom at all. They would use all kinds of arguments. Oh, we need to put all these light fittings in all these places, because we need to maintain even lighting. 

I used to say to them, I'll do it in a minute, but if you walk down the street, one minute there's sunshine and the next minute there's a cloud of that. And the more uneven the lighting, the more interesting it gets. So there was a compromise actually to get their even lighting, because they said they were bound by hospital notes, building notes, to provide even lighting. 

And I was determined not to allow even lighting. So in addition to their even lighting, which was reduced down to almost nothing, we then designed pockets of lighting that would highlight bits of the long corridor. Usually you have a long corridor. 

The last thing that you want is even lighting, which is what you get in Austria continuously. So we had to create these things. In addition to that, for me, one of the most important things is to get a long view.

Second Floor Central Atrium

You work for a long time in a building, and I hate buildings that are inward looking, and you can never relax your eyes by having a long view. And even at the end of the corridor you'll see there's a window, a massive window at the end of the corridor, so your eye can go to the end of the corridor and you can possibly move down there and have a small meeting if you want to. Talking of meetings, actually I suspect most of the meetings that go on here happen in corridors and spaces where there are dead ends, basically. 

There's a bridge on the very top floor that leads nowhere. And all these things are part of, if you like, my development over a lifetime. And I know these things are not necessary, but yes, it creates this possibility of meeting people privately. 

Beyond that, the piece of land here is very, extremely small, with very unfriendly neighbours. So we have to question everything that's in the hospital building, those are the requirements. And Theo, in fact, was one of the great exponents of actually reading through the hospital building notes, literally line by line, and discovering which bits we could not comply. 

And that was a very, very long list. And the hospital agreed to all our requests. Because the important thing is to have a very functional building that works. 

And I can understand why hospital building notes are written, because they're written by all kinds of people, without any reality really of the particularities of a plot of land, or its situation, and the possibilities that that could encourage. Existing houses, it was very important for us, and really a huge headache to maintain them. To maintain the levels, to maintain the floor-to-floor heights that a hospital building requires, all those things were absolutely crucial. 

The other thing is that a lot of architects would infill their atriums. There's one building that has had a beautiful photograph recently, and it's got a beautiful flying curved staircase, two flying staircases, a beautiful photograph. The trouble with doing things like that, they're very photogenic. 

But in reality, they actually obstruct the interconnection between people on various floor levels. We've got open terraces facing the atrium. So those are the corridor spaces. 

And as people walk around those corridor spaces, they can see their friends, their patients, and they know where they are in the three-dimensional space. And for me, that's another important element of the building. You've got to be able to see, let's say, on the ground floor, drinking coffee instead of going to work. 

I apologise to Argyro, because I think she's probably one of the most hard-working. She drinks coffee all the time. Well, there you go, Kypros knows, because he's seen her. 

So calming the building is very important. This room in itself, to me, is very important, because in a lecture theatre, as Kypros explained, you wouldn't really put glass in concrete. And this, basically, is made out of glass and concrete.

Third Floor looking down at Ground Floor Entrance Lobby

Now, to sort out the acoustics, you don't need to put absorbent materials, which most buildings have, because architects don't think about it. The important way of dealing with it is to have walls that are not parallel to each other. And that's why there's a variety of ideas here. 

First of all, it's a Greek amphitheatre, in terms of its country. It's got walls that are not parallel to each other. Even the back wall, which is made out of glass, is slanted, so any sound reflecting onto the glass will never reflect back again. 

And these break up the sound, and you don't need to put insulation in them, because they will just break the sound, because the sound from here will bounce in all kinds of directions, and therefore the sound will never congregate in any particular space. So I'm very proud of this room, actually, because I believe it's the only concrete and glass lecture theatre that works without any timber withholding it, or all kinds of things that you see when you go to the festival hall and all other institutions like that.

So my corridors are very important. All the services have been positioned in one line, in most cases. You won't see them all over the place. They're all in one line.

And it took a long time to work out the logic of how to resolve services on the ceiling, because we get a lot of service requirements on ceilings in hospital buildings. You've got all kinds of things, Wi-Fi, cameras, lighting. What I worked out, being a logical person, was that actually the sprinkler positions set out all the other services.

There's a requirement for how far one sprinkler is away from another, and that dictated precisely where all the services could go. We designed our own light fittings under the handrail to the main stairwell, which was designed by Theo, by the way. And the whole staircase, the whole enclosure.

And many other things, by the way. So, yeah, I think it's a nice building. I think you'll agree you'll enjoy working here, and I hope you'll enjoy the tour to the various platforms.

Thank you very much.

Speaker: Professor Kypros Nikolaides

We got the people at King's, and they were very supportive, to sign an agreement for 90 years to rent the building. And with that agreement, it was possible to get many, many millions of pounds from the bank. But then I made a mistake. We wrote a letter to King's saying that, of course, when you finish the building, the intention is to give it to you, to donate it to you. They were so incompetent, as you would expect. That's why the NHS has a zero chance of surviving. 

It's half-dead, perhaps much more than half-dead. And there is zero chance that the government, for this health minister, is going to have a beautiful healthcare to live. And he speaks very well to the face, but if you actually listen to what he's saying, he's actually not saying anything very much. I met him when they had the World Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology, and he came to speak, and I was speaking after him. And he said how we mismanaged patients, and he went to the North to count women, and he was sitting with them, and they were crying together. 

It was all very touching. And then he said, now I'm going to have an inquiry, and in three months we will change everything. And I said, what a joke. There's no chance at all that we will change anything, because they broke the soul of the NHS. So he gave them this letter, and a few years later, after the building was built, King's was 200 million pounds in the red. They are always in the red. 

And they appointed a new chief executive. They always do that. They appoint new people. 

Usually they move them around. So the health minister said we will dismantle the NHS England, and they took all of the leadership of the NHS England, and they put them as chief executives in all the hospitals. So they never lose their jobs. 

They say fake people go around and carry positions of power. Then they realised that this building was very bad for the hospital, because they had this agreement for 90 years, and it amounted to enormous amounts of cost. So they came to me and they said, we cannot afford this building, and we are paying too much. 

I said, but don't worry, because this building is yours. It's for you. They said, what do you mean it's ours? I said, well, we wrote for you a letter, when you gave us the money, that we will donate it to you. 

They said, really? Where is this letter? So I got Thanos to send them the letter. That was the biggest mistake of my life. Because the next day they came to us and they said, we need this building now, because it's worth nothing. Do you understand what I mean? We have good lawyers here, but we have an agreement with the banks, and on the basis of that agreement, this building costs 50 million pounds, but the letter that says it is donated to King's for free, the building is worth nothing at all. So they blackmailed us for a while, and then we reached an agreement how the building is passed on to King's. But they were so ungrateful. 

And here we come, 10 years later. This is 10 years after the building was built. I wanted to meet you and to honour George, because every day, patients are coming from many parts of the world, and they always admire this building. 

The main feature of it is, it achieves what I discussed with George in the beginning, We need to create the concept of an art gallery, because pregnant women should not feel that they are ill. 

They should come to celebrate the fact that they are pregnant. Very, very few of them have problems. And if we have a good atmosphere, then they will feel better when they arrive. 

And I think we achieved that. But it's a concept of this idea that, don't worry, it's an art gallery. You can spend as much money as you want. 

It's a good example. As you leave the room, say, ah! And then you will realize that that's the perfect acoustics. Ah! There's no reverberation. 

There are chairs. You can look out and see the beautiful structures. And I don't know, George, how much each one of these... You know, you go to any lecture theatre, however sophisticated the lecture theatre is, and you have a disgusting structure, usually the front, which is a wooden structure with a lot of holes. 

And that is for acoustics. And to hide that, you have these massively glass fins. I don't know how much each one of them was. 

A few thousand pounds each. So, I think... George produced a series of drums. And I am partly the ideal customer for an architect, and more so for builders. 

Because the builders make up their money from clients that keep changing their mind. And every time I came to see what George was doing, I was changing my mind. We wanted to do more things. 

Everything really. One of the cheapest things that you can have is the... What do you call this at the... The skirting board. The skirting board. 

Well, usually you put an MDF. But, of course, a few months later, when they wash the floor, the MDF swells and becomes disgusting. So George, instead of having MDF, he put the most expensive material that he could possibly imagine. 

And that was Corian. So the skirting board in this building is made up of Corian. I think the most difficult part of it was how to bring together a series of very old buildings that were completely full of pigeons. 

And they belonged to the Maudsley. The Maudsley is the most famous psychiatric hospital. It's very useful for us to be next to them, because every now and then I go there for therapy. 

I'm completely surrounded by the psychiatric hospital. They were really nasty to us, because they needed to sell the land, because for a certain period of time they needed money. And as soon as I bought the land, they acquired money from some err few that donated money to them. 

There's lots of them, and they have a lot of wealth. And then they did absolutely everything to block us from building anything, so that we would be forced to give the building, the land back to them at zero price. And I said, no chance. 

You cannot blackmail us. I want to build something where you like the building. But that meant that you had to keep changing the plans. 

So, for example, this is three floors. And originally we had a design for four floors. So they said, no, you cannot do that. 

And they put out all these arguments about right to light and so on. So, after we finished, they came along and they built the most disgusting building that you can possibly imagine in England. So, on your way out, after you finish walking past this building, you will see the most disgusting building of England. 

Typical of the NHS. Not only is it disgusting, but as you would expect, it's completely dysfunctional. And, of course, it's one floor higher than ours. 

We tried to preserve the most beautiful features of this building, and they have disgusting plastic windows, disgusting material, disgusting design. And George tries to modify that design, but, of course, they rejected it, because usually the people that get employed at the NHS are the worthless of people, whether they're IT people or lawyers or whatever. And the building has been built, and it's two years now, and nothing works, so it has not opened. 

...because the toilets don’t work, the air conditioning doesn’t work, nothing works. This is typical of the NHS. So, this is the... George managed to merge the old buildings in the front, and this was the garden of the buildings, with something new. 

To me, again, it was part of this ideology of the continuity of life from the past to the present and the future. One of the most expensive features of the building was something that the engineers actually hated George, because this is a classic relationship between engineers and architects, especially intelligent and ambitious architects. It was these columns, these concrete columns, and there are four of them, and those represent the pregnant woman, and also it is the logo of the Fetal Medicine Foundation, our charity. 

So, I'm very proud of this building. I'm very angry with Kings that they did not have the decency, after they received a donation of this building, to even bother to have an official opening. I didn't need them to. 

Because what matters is, for me, the patients that we see every day, that they are happy, the doctors that come from all over the world, that they are happy working here. And for me, it's a memory of that relationship that we had with George. This is only one small part of it. 

Because, you know, the Fetal Medicine Foundation is based on the extremely hard work of a series of doctors that come from all over the world to receive training here. They get a salary that is about one-tenth of what the doctors in England get paid for, and they constantly complain that they don't get enough, and they think they get too much from the doctors, especially the consultants. And they do very little, actually, nowadays. 

They get paid 120,000 pounds as a starting salary. They work for three days a week, and they get paid for five, and those three days they spend mostly complaining about, maybe what. Unlike the junior doctors, like my daughter, who get 25,000 pounds a week, a month, a year, and they cannot afford to rent a flat, for example, in Cambridge, where she was sent, because the flats there, the one-bedroom flats, are 2,000 pounds a month. 

And then, when she was sent to Cambridge for a year, and then now she's in the worst hospital in England. It was in the league tables last week. It is truly the worst hospital in England. 

It's... Kingsley. Kingsley. And she's doing psychiatry there, so she was very traumatized last week, because they saw a patient, and after he left the room, he came back, he opened the door. 

They opened the door, he went back into the room, and he punched the consultant in the face. The poor consultant was getting married at the end of that week. The good news is that he was black, so we won't show very much the black face that he received because of the punch. 

Now, this is, as I said, the success of the unit is the fact that we have fellows that come here from all over the world. Here we have a guy that came from... Where is he from? Ethiopia. He's left. 

He's here. A few months ago, he sent Anastasia and some other fellows from Ethiopia to open a philanthropy unit in one of the university hospitals. I think that they were traumatized by the fact that we are trying to build something. 

We gave them the best equipment, better than the ones that we have here. The problem is that the hospital was so extremely poor, they went on to the labour ward, and they don't even have water in the labour ward. They get really depressed about what they're trying to achieve with these things. 

The only thing, from my perspective, that we can achieve is to train doctors to their highest possible level, because the doctors in England, in appearance, they are trained and they go back into good hospitals. They have a lot of support. But this poor guy from Ethiopia, he will go back, and he will be the centre of attention. 

Maybe they will be grateful to him, or every now and then, one of the husbands will go into the room and punch him in the face. And you look at him, he's so thin. So, to me, the objective is to train them to the highest levels. 

But then, how do you then keep these people going when they come to England? We give them a very small scholarship, 25,000 pounds a year, that they cannot afford to live. So, what did we do with George? I went around the streets surrounding this building, and families helping. We were identifying buildings that were unsafe. 

And then we were buying those buildings. During that time, when it was possible to buy, now we cannot buy anything. And George was converting horrible places into fantastic one-bedroom flats, so that we have many of these one-bedroom flats where these people stay, and the least you can do. 

And then that establishes this concept of a family. They come here, they start in the morning at 7.30, 8. And they work until 8 at night. Today they were here to scan some patients for our research. 

They don't complain, because maybe they are scared of me to complain. But they go back, and they feel, I think, grateful, because they have learned something in those two years. And my objective is for them to go back and serve their local communities. 

There's a lot of people from all the countries of Europe and beyond. We have set up philanthropic units in Ethiopia, in Albania, in Mongolia, in Armenia, in Kosovo, in North Macedonia. And for as long as we are alive, and we will continue to have success in having research and everything else, we will continue to create more and more centres throughout the world. 

And to me, George is central in that process. He's central because he created this beautiful building, and he created the right buildings for so many people that live together, and they feel that they are part of a family. So, it's because of that that I decided that after 10 years, we will have just a simple plaque to acknowledge the fact that this building was designed by George. 

And for me, it's fantastic to see so many of my relatives. I don't know how Suzanne managed to gather them all. That's part of her skills, always. 

She's so successful in bringing the families together. And I thank you for coming. 

The ground floor, is for antenatal care. This is where patients, the poorest of patients from Brixton, black women, and poor white women from Peckham come. In this building, they have their antenatal team. 

And then on the first floor, we have an IVF unit in the honour of Persephone. And on the second floor is fetal medicine, where we are providing a model of care for women in this country that nowhere else is provided. And Lord Harris is this poor, uneducated boy from Peckham that used to work in a shop selling carpets. 

And when he grew up, he created the McDonaldization of carpets. He created a relatively good standard of carpets at a good price for the people. And he was very clever. 

He made millions of pounds, and he donated half a million pounds to create the first fetal medicine unit in 1984 at King's. And he was rewarded for that. Mrs. Diana came and opened the unit for the night, and then he became the Lord. 

And when I asked him to give us some money for this building, he said, I have moved on now. I don't trust doctors anymore. All the time I gave money to hospitals and doctors, it was squandered. 

Except your unit. And now I moved into schools. So he has taken the worst possible schools of England, certainly London, and he created the Harris Academies. 

He has put in his businessmen from his friends and companies to run his schools. The Harris Academies now have a better success in getting people into universities than the Dulwich College and the other expensive private schools around this area. Because he had that ethos of bringing the families together, and having good businessmen to run the schools. 

So it's not just a building. It is for me a philosophy of what we are trying to achieve. And for this, I will be forever grateful to George. 

So thank you, George. And thank you, Susie, for getting us all together today. APPLAUSE I really appreciate you coming here.

Talk End

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