His practice, Glenn Howells Architects, has offices in Birmingham and London. Howells founded his practice in London in 1990 but later moved the main office to Birmingham in 1992. GHA now employs 150 people in its Birmingham and London studios and works across the UK in many sectors including masterplanning, residential, offices, education, retail, health, hotel and leisure. Early projects included the award-winning Custard Factory, an affordable creative business space in Birmingham for developer Bennie Gray and a series of arts projects including the Market Place Theatre in Armagh, Northern Ireland and the Courtyard Theatre in Hereford. The practice subsequently expanded into residential and mixed-use regeneration schemes with a series of projects for innovative developer Urban Splash. These included Timber Wharf and Burton Place in Manchester and the remodeling of Birmingham's landmark Rotunda office building into residential use. Among its public projects is the Savill Building at Windsor Great Park, shortlisted for the 2007 RIBA Stirling Prize. The competition winning scheme run by The Crown Estate, was intended to create a gateway to the listed gardens reflecting the character and quality of the park. The building grouped all visitor facilities under a grid shell roof creating a series of linked spaces. The roof is constructed from larch and clad with green oak from sustainable sources from the Windsor Estate. It is supported by an earth structure on the entrance side which houses ancillary facilities, while the garden side is elevated on legs to take advantage of the views. It opened to the public in June 2006. Today, GHA is working on a number of large scale projects and masterplans including thousands of homes as part of the regeneration of London's former docks and the mixed-use redevelopment of the historically sensitive Paradise Circus area of central Birmingham for Argent. The practice's design approach was featured in an interview for the RIBA Journal in 2019. In 2018 Glenn Howells was appointed visiting professor at Birmingham City University in its School of Architecture and Design and chair of the Birmingham HippodromeBoard of Trustees.
Awards
GHA's projects have won a diverse range of awards including those of the Royal Institute of British Architects, the British Council for Offices, National Homebuilder, Housing Design and RICS awards, Civic Trust and Civic Voice awards, British Construction Industry Awards and Concrete Society and Brick Awards. In 2019 Glenn Howells was awarded the BCO Regional Committee Chair's Award in recognition of outstanding contribution to the regional property industry.
