Architecture and morality

It is behind the designs for buildings as varied and spectacular as the 80-storey Dubai Towers in Qatar, the Gazprom headquarters in St Petersburg, the Falkirk Wheel and the Olympic Convention Centre for the Beijing Olympics.

It is set to virtually double turnover to £80 million for the financial year that ends in April, which includes like-for-like growth of 20%. Pre-tax profits are set to almost double to £7.5 million.

On the other hand, the company has followed the reputational catastrophe of the Holyrood building by getting caught in the crossfire of international politics. Vladimir Putin's Western popularity might be sinking faster than you can say spaziba, but that has not stopped the firm from climbing into bed with several leading members of the Russian establishment.

First it picked up the commission to build the City Palace Tower in Moscow, an admittedly stunning, twisted skyscraper 44 storeys high, which is being developed by Alexander Chigirinsky, joint head of Sibir Energy. In a country where the rise to power of the oil oligarchs at the end of the Soviet era controversial to say the least, any Western company that takes their money is asking for awkward questions.

RMJM went further, however, winning the contract to design the 67-storey Gazprom Tower. This means it is effectively working for Putin, since Gazprom is both state-controlled and counts Putin's key ally and president-elect Alexander Medvedev as its deputy chairman. The tower project's chief executive, Nikolai Tanayev, is meanwhile the former prime minister of Kyrgyzstan, who faces accusations of money laundering in that central Asian country.

If all that were not enough, RMJM is now pitching for business and doing feasibility studies in the borderline dictatorship of Kazakhstan. Put this all together, and the partnership based in Edinburgh's leafy Dean Village could soon be giving Shell and British American Tobacco a run in the ethically controversial money-making stakes.

But Morrison the younger, sitting among the futuristic black and white cubic interiors of RMJM's head office, bats all this away with the same airy candour with which he answers most questions. "These guys in Russia have been fantastic clients to us. They have been easy to deal with and amenable, open and upfront. They have been hugely supportive of what we are doing," he says.

But while personal instincts can take you a certain way, this does not exactly sound like an ethical foreign policy. It sounds suspiciously like next stop Burma. "I have never seen an opportunity in Burma, but there might be a good British client of ours that wants to design something for their staff in a country like that and wants us to deliver a solution.

"But we won't work for someone who's got a history of doing anything immoral or criminal or illegal," he says.

Privately, there are senior people at RMJM who would add that all this concern over the former Soviet countries is somewhat hypocritical. They argue that you could just as easily accuse the US of human rights failings and brinkmanship, not to mention the UK.

There is also a feeling that RMJM is treated more sceptically than others due to the Holyrood row. For instance, London architect Norman Foster, who is also doing big things in Moscow, has not endured nearly so much criticism.

Having said that, there are signs that RMJM is finally putting its troubles behind it, with several recent bona fide Scottish successes to add to the international wins, most notably the masterplans for Leith docks in Edinburgh and the athletes' village for the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games.

Morrison says: "We are looking at the much wider outlook for our business, and if you go to America they don't know about the political turmoil surrounding the Scottish parliament. They see a fantastic building. It's less of an issue even in London."

He adds that only about 12% of group turnover comes from the UK and that the reputational damage from Holyrood is, in any case, receding.

Young-looking, even for his age, and seemingly too amiable and privileged to be an architecture tycoon in the making, Morrison comes from one of Scotland's wealthiest families. His father built up buildings and services group Morrison Construction and sold it to infrastructure giants AWG for £257m in 2000.

Some of the proceeds were used to set up venture capital fund Teasses Capital, named after the family estate in Fife, which invested in RMJM in 2002 and also has a stake in Aberdeen oil services company Ramco and various property interests.

Having studied law at Dundee and then an MBA at London's Imperial College, Peter Morrison spent the first three years as a non-executive director before replacing Brian Stewart as the chief executive in 2005. There are different versions of why Stewart left after three decades: it was either, as Morrison says, because he was "shattered" after the Holyrood debacle, or because he disagreed with the firm's increasingly commercial direction. Morrison says this latter version is "rubbish".

Morrison concedes that one or two sceptical heads needed knocked together to convince them that he was not too young and inexperienced when he took over, but insists that most were not senior level and nobody left over it.

"I addressed things head on at an early stage I was saying to them, Don't take my word for it. Let me prove that I can do a job here,'" he says.

The Morrison strategy has been to move away from what is known in the trade as executive architecture, where you let someone else design a building and take it over to finish off the details.

This was the model that RMJM followed with Spanish firm EMBT to design Holyrood, and Morrison explains it is both bad for architects' morale, since they do not get to do high-end designing, and bad for the bottom line, since it produces much lower margins.

"High-end design firms would be in the 15% margin bracket, whereas with executive architecture, you would expect below 5%," he says, adding that this change is one of the reasons why RMJM's margins are now up to close to 10% and rising.

The second part of the strategy, also benefiting the bottom line, was to free talented architects from doing other jobs such as accounting and marketing by putting systems in place that took care of all those things.

The next step was to win premium contracts, of which the first was the Beijing Olympic centre. Followed by wins in the likes of Moscow and Doha, this culminated in the Gazprom Tower and an entertainment and hospitality complex in Macau, thought to be the largest construction project in the world.

Also last year, came the £15m deal to buy Hilliers, the fifth-largest architect in America. Morrison says this made sense because it quickly gave the company a strong base in the most important market in the industry.

"The US is the largest architecture market with almost 60% of worldwide revenues. The education market will see something like $40 billion £20.3bn invested in the next 10 years.

"We have a strong history in that area, having done five buildings for Oxford and Cambridge universities, brands that extend over the world. At the same time, US developers brought us great contacts in places like China," he says.

So seriously is Hilliers being taken that Sir Fraser Morrison, on the cusp of 60, has moved with his wife to New York to oversee its integration. There will be more acquisitions to meet the rising demand for huge mixed-use sites as developers look to further boost their profits.

"We are on the cusp of a huge change in the industry. You are going to see the emergence of super-firms.

"The analogy is the emergence of private equity firms in the 1970s and 1980s. This meant that the investment banks had to become much bigger to cope with bigger deals," he says.

RMJM has no other deals in its own sights this year while it digests Hilliers, but it is in negotiations to buy a small Sydney practice to get a toehold in Australia, and western Europe is the next target for expansion. Spain, Germany and France are top of RMJM's list.

The trick, of course, is to achieve all this without ruining the firm's reputation for cutting-edge work. It is not seen as perhaps first-class from an artistic point of view, but designers such as creative director Tony Kettle and Paul Stallan, head of the Glasgow office, are well regarded in the industry.

Contrast this with many other large practices, which tend to lose their souls and focus on putting in rock-bottom corner-cutting bids for huge projects.

As for Morrison and his father, they may be in the venture capital game but they stress that they are in it for the long haul. There are no plans for a flotation or an early retirement either.

"Part of the reason I absolutely love what I do here is the involvement with people. I am a very driven and ambitious character. My ambition is to grow this into the premier design brand in the industry," Morrison says.