Thirty-five years ago, Brian Johnson was given the opportunity to enter an international architectural competition for the design of the Dubai Creek Golf & Yacht Club as a result of him being responsible for the design of the Emirates Golf Club a few years before when he was managing partner of his previous practice.

His design won the competition and he immediately established an office in Dubai where he and his team were kept busy on the Dubai Creek Golf Clubhouse and the Creek Yacht Club. Shortly afterwards Johnson was asked to design the Palm Tree Court extension at the Jebel Ali Resort, and a number of new commissions followed from there.

Johnson had originally designed the Dubai College in 1978 with a previous practice and the school asked him to take over the work again and this, combined with work with Mirage Mille on the One&Only Royal Mirage and the Bab al Shams Desert Resort, led to the majority of the work in subsequent years being in the hospitality and education sectors.

The firm has been the design firm of choice for many distinguished projects over the years including VIDA and The Palace Hotel and Residential projects, Al Seef Dubai, an array of University and Cultural projects for HH The Ruler of Sharjah as well as Dubai College, Dubai Sports City, Arcadia Schools, The Chedi Al Bait, Al Wathba Desert Resort & Spa in Abu Dhabi and a range of other hotel projects throughout the region including the Warner Bros Hotel, Abu Dhabi, Jebel Ali Palm Tree Court, and the DoubleTree by Hilton & Hilton Garden Inn Riyadh, many of which have resulted in the firm winning a raft of design awards.

Today, Godwin Austen Johnson is a team of 110 committed colleagues working on diverse projects across the region from contemporary and traditional hotels and residential towers to modern education projects and large master planning projects. They have built a solid portfolio of iconic projects and a network of clients across the Middle East and North Africa region.

In addition to the obvious milestones of successfully completed projects over the past 35 years Godwin Austen Johnson has established a number of internal departments all of which actively complement the architectural heart of the practice including a fully functioning MEP team which has evolved over the years to be one of the most highly regarded in the region.

“I look back on the last 35 years of the practice with immense satisfaction in what we have achieved and the many talented colleagues who have worked with us for many of the past three and half decades. I am in the proud position of seeing colleagues either leave us to set up their own businesses or being head-hunted by other firms to take over senior roles in international organisations; we have an extremely impressive list of Alumni in all consultancy fields across the region and beyond. Equally many of the team we have with us today have been with the firm for many years and even, in some cases, have rejoined us,” comments Johnson.