ABOUT

A passionate environmentalist, architect, urbanist, researcher, and mentor, Sandra has lived and worked in the UAE for over 25 years. She leads tangramGulf’s MENA region studio, the “2019 – Middle East Architecture Firm of the Year” by Middle East Economic Digest, and recipient of many notable accolades including six international sustainable design awards for five different projects in four years. In 2016 she became the 30th Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 30 years and the very first one from the Gulf region, she also is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, an Academician at the UK’s Academy of Urbanism, and the RIBA Regional Ambassador for sustainability, promoting and developing British design and education skills internationally.

Sandra moved to the UAE from the UK in the mid-1990s to work on the analysis, review, and development of the Al Ain City master plan, which had been implemented five years earlier, igniting a lifelong commitment to broadening an understanding of desert urbanism and the delivery of regionally significant schemes that respect and respond to local climatic, environmental, cultural, social, and economic sustainability needs. Her subsequent project work spans from the usage of traditional materials and methods of construction in the regeneration and development of the historic Arts and Heritage Area of Sharjah, delivering one of the very last new-build projects in the UAE following traditional coral stone and timber construction techniques and practices, in the 1990’s; the first green-roofed Government building in Dubai in the 2000’s, part of the development and introduction of the Green Building Regulations and Specifications; a state-of-the-art campus of support facilities for the Emirates Nuclear Energy Programme in Abu Dhabi designed using the principles of traditional desert urbanism, in the 2010’s. And today, on site in North Africa we have a Woman and Children’s cancer hospital which will be home to the country’s first ever stem cell transplant unit. Here the wards for children with long and isolated recovery from transplants are designed to be embedded in a Winter Garden to promote the benefits of harnessing nature as a therapeutic healing environment.

In 2021, after decades of recognition in a career driving sustainable strategies and climatic responsive solutions Sandra co-founded the RIBA GCC Sustainability Group through which she co-produces, co-curates, and co-hosts the ongoing Sustainability Development Series, sharing awareness, knowledge, skills, and tools with built environment professionals across the GCC, and beyond. Showcasing projects, processes and strategies that will help us all meet the challenges faced in delivering a regional route to realise the decarbonisation targets of the Gulf States as they address their commitments to the UN’s SDGs. In June 2021, she was elected by RIBA Chartered members across the region to be the UAE Country Representative on the RIBA’s Gulf Chapter Committee, to represent the needs and interests of the Chapter’s largest contingent of chartered members.

In 2022, Sandra founded tangramTERRA our sustainability division to highlight sustainability case-studies from her generation of work on regionally significant programmes, and to offer a resource centre for the open access to key regional and global agreements, guides, toolkits etc. for public access and use. And led the opening of our new studio, tangramMETA from where she is designing a “Hospital of the Future” prototype utilising AI, Sandra proposes designs for a hospital without walls, using advanced technologies as an exponent of sustainability, decentralising non-clinical patient, education and training spaces and locates them in the Metaverse. Designed to achieve a radical reduction in carbon, energy, water, and waste footprints, of costly physical construction.

Sandra is a true professional and mentor to all in the studio, and beyond. She is a long-standing mentor with Women’s Foundations, the University of Greenwich School of Design, and a founding mentor at the University Women’s Club in London. She is a visiting lecturer at schools of architecture worldwide, and devised and delivers the inaugural “sustainable design” programme for students at De Montfort University’s Dubai Campus.