Pick Everard brings in senior consultant to support Building Safety Act team

An experienced architectural designer and project manager has joined the Building Safety Act (BSA) team at Leicester-headquartered multi-disciplinary consultancy Pick Everard.

Specialising in high-risk buildings, senior BSA consultant Aditya Sardesai brings a wealth of expertise from his time working across construction, architecture and property development. 

Sardesai, who studied for a bachelor of architecture in India and completed his MSc in construction project management at Queen's University Belfast, said: "I've been interested in architecture and tall buildings since I was a child. That interest never really moved on. I still spend my days on high-rise buildings, just from the safety and compliance side now rather than the drawing board.

"I trained as an architect in India but I always wanted more involvement in the project than just designing it. I wanted to know how the structure actually got built. After my bachelor degree I deliberately went to site rather than into a studio.

"Those years when I was site-based, spending every day with contractors, are the ones that shaped me most. That's where I learned how a design actually works on site: what's buildable, what sequence it has to go in, where a detail is going to fail, and how a decision made on a drawing plays out in cost and programme. You don't get that from a screen."

A chartered member of the CIOB, Sardesai has taken key roles in a variety of projects in the UK, such as hotel and leisure developments, residential, care and commercial builds, including a 21-storey higher-risk building. 

As an APS-registered Principal Designer Building Regulations (PDBR), he has guided projects through the Gateway 2 stage, securing building control approval from the Building Safety Regulator.

As a senior BSA consultant at Pick Everard, Sardesai is supporting clients on a variety of projects across disciplines including education and healthcare. His experience of the building control regime for HRBs brings additional depth to the expertise in the 11-strong Building Safety Act team, with Sardesai taking the lead on compliance on several flagship new build and remediation contracts.

"My first real exposure to HRBs was as an intern when I worked on Puneville, a 28-acre integrated township in Pune, India, made up of 19 towers of 22 storeys each," he said. "It gave me a serious grounding in architectural drawing, and it set the scale of projects I've gone after ever since.

"Coming from an architectural background with significant on-site exposure gives me a blend of design vision and construction delivery that I think is rare. Building safety was a natural next step for me. As a senior consultant in building safety my work with Pick Everard is incredibly varied. 

"Looking back, I've been the one drawing the project, the one on site building it, the one appraising the space, the one managing the client's money, and now the one accountable for whether it complies. Because I've spent years on site, my compliance advice isn't theoretical. I know what closing a gap will cost, how long it will take, and who on site has to do it."