Type to search

HDR | Rice Daubney announces rename to HDR

HDR | Rice Daubney announces rename to HDR

Share

Global architecture practice HDR acquired Sydney-based studio Rice Daubney in 2013. Since that local acquisition, HDR | Rice Daubney has been operating across the country, taking out several awards along the way. Also in that time, a Melbourne office has been added to the fold, led by the expansion of its defence work. As a final step in the acquisition process, HDR | Rice Daubney will now be known as simply HDR.

Stephen Auld, managing director at HDR.

Stephen Auld, managing director at HDR.

“HDR has one of the world’s largest and most successful healthcare and science architecture practices in the world with more than 1,500 employees. When the Australian business was acquired back in 2013, the aim was to give clients access to a deeper pool of specialised knowledge and our employee’s opportunities to develop, learn and utilise new technologies to design, test and create the best architecture for all our clients,” states Stephen Auld, managing director at HDR.

Auld elaborates that “the change of the name was the next step in this journey, it takes the geography out of the name. And now our business continues to move beyond its traditional Sydney base as we recently opened an office in Melbourne and we’re actively looking at other cities beyond the eastern seaboard.”

Bringing two practices together is not always an easy road to go down and sometimes many facets of the business can be affected. Auld furthers that for this name update, “there is no impact to the business. The local talent, team, culture and design competencies remain. What has changed over the last three years is our access to additional benefits from HDR’s global knowledge and capabilities, this has in turn directly benefited our clients through the services we provide.”

From the staff’s perspective, “it has created opportunities to work on international projects and incorporate global expertise for Australian projects, which has been highly valued. It has also given staff access to computation design, data-driven design and analytics, and specialist capabilities that have provided upskill and career development opportunities for our team. All of which was the desired outcome of the merger in 2013.

With new name finalising what was set out from the original acquisition, HDR is now looking to grow in Australia in the near term. Long term, Auld says “our focus is not on ‘how big’, rather we are more interested in where the opportunities lie and where we can satisfy the needs of clients. We have opened in Melbourne and we feel this will grow reasonably quickly with our recent defence project wins. But we will also continue to look at opportunities across Australia.”

Images courtesy HDR.

hdrinc.com/au

Global architecture studio HASSELL recently acquired London-based UX company Free State, read about it here.

Tags:

You Might also Like

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *