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Piers Watts-Jones MSc BEng CEng MCIBSE MASHRAE

Technical Director, London

Prior to joining the Atelier Ten team in 2006, Piers had accumulated significant experience in the building services industry, starting his career in the renewable energy sector and then working for the BMW group as construction manager at the Rolls Royce assembly plant. He began his Atelier Ten career leading the coordination and integration of the extremely complex central energy systems at Gardens by the Bay in Singapore. Piers was crucial in coordinating with the contractors and with our local partner engineers to ensure that they fully understood the nuances of the system and the complex thermodynamics of the processes involved.

At Chelsea Barracks, a 12.8 acre masterplan project, Piers coordinated the sitewide MEP strategy from concept through a successful planning submission.  Following planning he was responsible for the detailed design of the sitewide infrastructure, incorporating ground source heat pumps with open loop boreholes and a central combined heat and power plant and continues to manage the project through the site phase.

One of the largest single buildings to have come through the Atelier Ten office is the 300,000m2 headquarters for Sberbank in Skolkovo, Russia. Piers managed a large team through the development of a coherent environmental services strategy across an extremely complex office space. Sberbank and the Lusail Hotel in Qatar were two projects that he has worked on in collaboration with Zaha Hadid architects.

Closer to home, Piers has been involved in the National Theatre for many years. Initially he worked with a large interdisciplinary team to create an Environmental Masterplan for the theatre. This led to a full refurbishment of the 3.4mW boiler plant and the installation of a CHP, absorption chillers and phase change materials… all carried out without the theatre having to cancel a single performance!

Additional projects include the insertion of an award-winning library into the basement of the historic Queen’s College at Oxford, incorporating adiabatic cooling and storage that meets full archive conditions. And the jewel-like (also award-winning) Maggie’s centre at Oldham, required a very minimalist mechanical touch, designed for maximum client comfort utilising natural ventilation.