Our guest this week is the architect Larry Malcic. Larry was born in St Louis in the American mid west. He later went on to study architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, being taught for a time by the hugely influential architect Louis Khan.
After University it was in St Louis that Larry started his own practice – just over the road from HOK the practice formed by George Hellmuth, Gyo Obata and George Kassabaum.
Alongside his practice, Larry taught for a time at Washington University in St Louis – teaching for a while alongside his good friend Neave Brown.
In 1988 Larry joined HOK – the office across the street – and then moved across the Atlantic to start HOK’s European practice, based in London.
Under his leadership the office has grown to over 130 people, partly growing organically and in 1995 by incorporating the practice Cecil Denny Highton.
HOK now has 24 studios across the US and Canada as well as offices in Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Mumbai, Dubai and of course London – making it comfortably one of the world’s ten largest architecture firms.
In this week’s episode we talk about many of the practice’s most notable buildings in London including the Francis Crick Institute, the world headquarters for Barclays Bank in Canary Wharf, and an early but influential project, St Barnabas Church in Dulwich.