What happened Gilbert-Ash has secured the £40m main contract to redevelop RIBA's headquarters at 66 Portland Place in London, Construction News reported this week. The Grade II*-listed building has been closed to the public since June 2025, with RIBA staff moved to temporary space at the Royal College of Physicians' Jerwood Centre nearby while the works take place. Completion is scheduled for September 2027.

Gilbert-Ash has been on site under a pre-construction services agreement for around a year and has now been appointed to deliver the main works, which form part of RIBA's wider £85m House of Architecture programme covering the building alongside investment in its collections and digital services. Ageing building services will be stripped out and replaced, and the external envelope upgraded to improve energy efficiency and tackle water ingress.

Benedetti Architects developed the concept design after winning an architectural competition in 2022, with Purcell now acting as executive architect. Gardiner & Theobald is project manager, Jackson Coles is quantity surveyor, Eckersley O'Callaghan is structural engineer and Harley Haddow is services engineer.

Why it matters The scheme has been designated a pilot project for the UK Net Zero Carbon Buildings Standard, the framework developed jointly by RIBA, CIBSE, IStructE, LETI, BBP, RICS, BRE, the Carbon Trust and UKGBC to define what net zero actually means for a UK building. That gives this job a significance well beyond its size. Whoever delivers it credibly will have a case study that few competitors can match once the standard starts appearing in client briefs more widely.

It also lands at a point when new-build office construction has been falling (UK office construction output was down 20% in 2025), pushing more of the workload in commercial and institutional buildings towards retrofit and refurbishment of existing stock rather than new-build. A high-profile, technically demanding retrofit like this one is a marker of where the work, and the fee income, is heading.

What it means for your career If you are a quantity surveyor, project manager or services engineer with listed-building experience, this is the kind of project worth watching and, if you get the chance, worth being on. Costing and programming a strip-out and re-service of an occupied heritage building, while hitting a net zero carbon standard that is still being tested in practice, is a specialist skill set, and there are not many people in the market who can point to a completed pilot project on their CV.

For anyone building a career in retrofit rather than new-build, London still has the deepest pool of institutional and listed clients (professional bodies, City livery companies, national museums) who will need this exact combination: heritage sensitivity plus decarbonisation delivery. Get named on a project like this one and you will be fielding calls from every contractor bidding for the next one.