Ben Morris, managing director, Vector Foiltec

My dream specification is ...

A zero-energy variable skin. It contributes rather than takes from the environment.

I swear by ...

Light and elegant design engineering solutions.

Our best recent innovation is ...

Our patented smoke ventilation cushion. In a fire, the sealing cushion is designed to fail so that an atrium becomes a courtyard or a covered shopping mall becomes a street. This also produces cost savings for clients against conventional solutions.

Innovation doesn鈥檛 work unless it brings the client cost savings.

My worst specification nightmare is ...

An incompetent contractor, QS and design team. It helps if the team is put together earlier or everyone ends up having to live with a bad design decision. Competitive tendering is crap and doesn鈥檛 buy the client value if the knowledge base doesn鈥檛 exist within the team.

The worst piece of red tape was ...

Getting acoustic approval for the Beijing aquatic centre, when the authorities requested that we work out the terminal velocity of a typical Chinese raindrop. We ended up having to build a test rig 13m high to test the impacts on our inflated cushions.

Vector Foiltec

Topics

Specifier 2 March 2007