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After Mayor Johnson announced the competition, Lenczner says the idea took a while to build momentum in the Foster + Partners office. Through conversations with Aston Martin, they realized it was a valuable opportunity to bring together two British design firms, “with us very interested in creating public designs for London, and Aston Martin’s automotive expertise, we thought we could learn a lot from each other in terms of how designs can evolve.”
The team started by studying an original Routemaster bus. While the goal of the competition was not to a design a new Routemaster — instead it was for a new London bus — “everyone thinks of the Routemaster first, so starting there made sense,” says Lenczner. “We poured all over the bus, which was not only an icon, but ahead of its time. The original Routemaster adopted technology from the aerospace industry after the war, such as the monocoque design and lightweight aluminum construction. We wanted to use that same thinking, using modern technology, and a lot of that we learned from Aston Martin.”
Foster + Partners also interviewed people who worked on the Routemaster buses and riders on the two Heritage Routes operated by TfL (along which Routemasters still travel the streets, picking up regular passengers). The actual design started from scratch, working from the inside out. In talking with operators, the designers learned they liked having their own cab so they could concentrate on driving. That feature was adopted.
Lenczner says they kept a scale model of the Routemaster bus around when working on the design, and through the project learned why the Routemaster has the features it does, and why it was kept in service as long as it was. “Many times we wanted to do things different, but would return to the original.”
When the winners were announced in December, Marek Reichman, design director for Aston Martin, Gaydon, England, said: “This unique project has been a great experience for the Aston Martin team and has allowed us to showcase the considerable and diverse design competence of our team, while affording us the opportunity to apply elements of our design language to an entirely different concept.”
At the time, Mayor Johnson said, “I promised Londoners that I would hold a competition to design a new bus for London, based on the much-missed Routemaster. When I launched the competition, I asked for stylish and imaginative designs which would resonate with Londoners. We have had a phenomenal response, with ideas submitted from around the globe, and we now have, in our joint winners, two stunning designs that allow us to go forward and produce a truly iconic bus fit for 21st century London. I know that, like me, Londoners will be waiting eagerly to see how these ideas evolve into the final design that will appear on our roads.”
Gina Tompkin contributed to this story from London.
