Bio

Sadie is a Co-Founding Director of dRMM alongside Alex de Rijke and Philip Marsh. Over a 25-year career Sadie has played a key role in the advocacy of exemplary design and architecture through her professional practice and advisory roles. Sadie has led a number of award-winning projects at dRMM, including the innovative residential scheme, No.One Centaur Street. Elements of Sadie’s design thinking can be found throughout dRMM’s projects, from the Stirling Prize-winning Hastings Pier to Trafalgar Place, Clapham Manor Primary School and Faraday House at the Battersea Power Station. In her role as a design champion Sadie’s involved in a number of advisory roles including chairing the Independent Design Panel for High Speed Two and being one of ten commissioners for the National Infrastructure Commission (NIC). She has been instrumental in setting up the NIC’s Design Group which will place design at the heart of all new major infrastructure projects. In 2017 Sadie was chosen as a Mayor’s design advocate for the Greater London Authority and became a non- executive director of the Major Project Association. In 2019, Sadie was awarded a RIBA Honorary Fellowship and appointed as a member to the Homes England board, the UK government’s housing accelerator. She recently founded the Quality of Life Foundation – a new independent body aimed at raising people’s quality of life and wellbeing through the improvement of the built environment. Sadie lectures internationally on the work of dRMM and the importance of infrastructure which connects back to people and place. In 2013 she became the youngest president of the Architectural Association, and in 2016 she was appointed professor at the University of Westminster and in 2022 the Sir Arthur Marshall professorship at Cambridge University. She has been awarded an honorary doctorate from London South Bank University and the University College of Estate Management. In 2017, she was named New Londoner of the Year by the NLA for her work championing the importance of design at the highest political level and most recently she won ‘Female Architectural Leader of the Year’ at the BD awards and AJ100 Contribution to the Profession. In the New Years Honours 2020, she was awarded an OBE by the Queen for services to design advocacy in the built environment.