Hasta La Ideas

The architecture studio that refurbished Grenfell Tower has been excoriated in the final report of the long-running public inquiry into a devastating fire at the building in 2017.

London-based Studio E was determined to have “demonstrated a cavalier attitude to the regulations affecting fire safety” during its work on the project, which included the installation of highly flammable cladding to the block’s exterior.

Published today, the 1,700-page report found that Studio E, which has since gone into liquidation, “bears a very significant degree of responsibility for the disaster”.

Studio E “fell below standard of a reasonably competent architect”

“As architect Studio E was responsible for the design of the external wall and for the choice of the materials used in its construction,” the report said.

The studio had specified zinc cladding for the project, which was later swapped for a deadly aluminium composite material (ACM) product by the client, Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation (TMO), in a bid to reduce costs.

But the inquiry concluded that it was still the architect’s responsibility to check that the ACM complied with building regulations.

“Its failure to recognise that ACM was dangerous and to warn the TMO against its use represented a failure to act in accordance with the standard of a reasonably competent architect,” the report said.

During the course of the inquiry, Studio E contended that its role on the project was to guide aesthetics, and that responsibility for fire safety and compliance lay with other parties.

Studio E, as well as the project contractor, Rydon, and the cladding sub-contractor, Harley, were criticised for taking “a casual approach to contractual relations”.

“They did not properly understand the nature and scope of the obligations they had undertaken, or, if they did, paid scant attention to them,” the report said.

“They failed to identify their own responsibilities for important aspects of the design and in each case assumed that someone else was responsible for matters affecting fire safety.”

Studio E was also at fault for failing to recognise that the combustible Celotex foam insulation fitted as part of the project was unsuitable, the inquiry found.

It also failed to ensure that fire-safety consultant Exova completed a fire-safety strategy for the refurbished building, failed to understand that it was responsible for work by sub-contractors and missed errors around the windows that helped the fire to spread.

“The deaths that occurred were all avoidable”

Seventy-two people were killed after a fire broke out at Grenfell Tower, a 1970s North Kensington social-housing block, in the early hours of 14 June 2017.

Started by a faulty fridge-freezer, the fire spread rapidly up and around the building via the external cladding system installed as part of the refurbishment project, which was completed only a year earlier.

Today’s report marks the end of a seven-year-long public inquiry into the disaster, which was the deadliest residential fire in the UK since world war two.

“The simple truth is that the deaths that occurred were all avoidable, and those who lived in the tower were badly failed over a number of years and in a number of different ways by those who were responsible for ensuring the safety of the building and its occupants,” inquiry chair Martin Moore-Bick said in a statement this morning.

“All contributed to it in one way or another, in most cases through incompetence, but in some cases through dishonesty and greed.”

Criminal charges not expected until end of 2026

Phase two of the enquiry aimed to identify the causes of the disaster, with more than 80 weeks of evidence heard.

A phase one report focusing on the events on the night of the fire published in 2019 already concluded that Grenfell Tower’s external walls did not comply with building regulations.

Though the inquiry is barred from drawing conclusions about criminal responsibility, its findings are likely to have a bearing on the ongoing police investigation into the fire. Detectives are not expected to pass charging files to prosecutors until late 2026.

Lawyers representing Studio E confirmed to Dezeen that it would not be commenting on the inquiry report.

In a closing statement to the inquiry, the studio had argued that the large number of high-rise buildings found to have similar cladding to Grenfell after the fire “demonstrates that Studio E acted in a manner consistent with a responsible body of its profession”.

In April 2023, a group of more than 900 people affected by the fire agreed a settlement with companies and public bodies involved in the refurbishment, including Studio E, for an undisclosed sum of compensation.

In July, the Grenfell Tower Memorial Commission and the Royal Institute of British Architects launched the process to select the design team for a memorial on the site of Grenfell Tower, which is still standing.

The design brief specifies that the memorial should be in the form of a garden and display the names of the 72 people who perished in the fire. A shortlist of five studios will be selected in the autumn.

This story will be updated with more information.

The photo is by Iordanis via Shutterstock.

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Heavy-lift machinery and vehicles informed the set design of the sci-fi horror film Alien: Romulus, production designer Naaman Marshall tells Dezeen in this interview.

Helmed by director Fede Álvarez, the film is the seventh instalment in the Alien franchise, which began in 1979 with Ridley Scott’s film Alien.

Alien: Romulus follows a group of space colonists who encounter hostile extraterrestrial lifeforms while scavenging Renaissance, a derelict research station, in the year 2142.

Marshall and Álvarez were determined to reinterpret the future Alien world while honouring legacy components from the franchise’s first two practical effects-focused films.

“Those are the fun ones for us,” Marshall told Dezeen. “I knew I was going to have a chance to build stuff and it wasn’t going to be computer-generated, it wasn’t just going to be slick and white and clean.”

Keeping in line with the franchise’s industrial design aesthetic, Marshall and Álvarez leant into original concept art by artist Ron Cobb. The structures of heavy-lift machinery and vehicles also informed the design, which Marshall aimed to keep as realistic as possible.

“I tend to design based on something that’s real – or you lie to yourself and tell you it’s real, and you come up with a whole backstory of what it actually is,” explained Marshall.

All filming took place in Budapest, aside from the shooting of miniatures in Los Angeles, to facilitate a lot of stage space, crew members and amenities.

The designer said the Hungarian capital provided a good chance of finding “out-of-the-norm locations”, mainly for the Jackson’s Star mining colony run by the fictional megacorporation Weyland-Yutani.

Locations included a working power plant. Here, the team shot large wheel-loaders inside its cooling structure, which held real steam that was used in the final shots.

Two spacecraft miniatures, roughly two meters in length, were built for the film’s exterior shots. One was for the Corbelan, a hauler the colonists fly to Renaissance, and the other for a Weyland-Yutani Echo probe featured in the film’s opening flight.

Originally designed as a visual-effect aid, the miniatures were eventually built, painted and finished by effects company Studio Gillis and shot in front of full screens and smoke.

The final shape of the Corbelan, which Marshall described as “an earth mover in space”, was influenced by bulldozers and aerial cranes.

Its interior is comprised of a cargo bay on one end with hibernation pods that lead to a narrow, straight corridor. This was a nod to the original film’s “architecture, the bones of it, the shapes”, Marshall said.

The corridor opens up into the “suit room” – the ship’s maintenance area, which contains technology for operating generators and mechanisms that grip and hold onto containers.

“We started looking into cranes in harbours, it was very utilitarian in that sense,” said Marshall.

To meet a brief outlined by Álvarez, who wanted the cockpit “as tight as possible”, the design team built the structure on a gimbal five meters off the ground for flight simulators to capture shaking actions.

“I’m a big fan of bringing the ceilings in, you start feeling the floor and really getting a 360 view,” said Marshall. “Fede wanted that sense of excitement and thrill; some of the characters had never seen space or the sun before.”

Corbelan’s suit room set contained steps and stairs with actual doors that opened up in the centre for actor Cailee Spaeny to jump into the cargo bay two metres below.

Research into the set design for Alien: Romulus initially began with the 2014 survival-horror video game Alien: Isolation as a framework reference.

But Marshall eventually focused more on the textures and “old patinas” of the original 1979 film, building each set in-house with the help of a design team.

“Zsuzsanna Sipos, my set decorator in Budapest, had a cast of characters that would 3d print, sculpt and paint,” said Marshall.

Alien: Romulus also embraces the 1986 sequel’s updated aesthetics by exhibiting “twenty, thirty years newer technology” on the Renaissance.

Marshall described the Renaissance research station as “split in two”, divided into the older Remus lab and the new Romulus module.

Connecting both labs is a long hallway and a long staircase, which were shot at night in the subway of Budapest.

A full kit of facehugger alien animatronics were crafted for a fight-chase scene in the Remus lab, including stationary versions and ones with wheels for travelling fast on floors. These were designed “like remote control cars”, Marshall said.

Effects company Legacy Effects produced an animatronic doll from the torso up to create the damaged android Rook in the likeness of late actor Ian Holm, who portrayed Ash in the original film.

This sat atop a computer-bench set piece with a trap door underneath for puppeteers to operate its arm movements. Technicians operated the doll’s mouth to sync up its dialogue.

The set design also featured five “extremely heavy” elevator sets and a massive 50-metre “hive” set housing a colony of xenomorphs – aliens in their final adult form – in the Romulus lab.

The design team incorporated rails and tracks on castors for pulling actors through the sets for the film scenes that feature weightless travel.

Some elevator sets were built horizontally to capture different hair movements as actors flew down, while others were vertical for shots of them holding onto ladders.

“I try to have one set that I push to the point where you think you might fail,” Marshall said of the hive build.

“That was challenging – to make a cool-looking set, and then having tracks in the ceiling so you could fly through there.”

The slanted, arc-shaped set was eight metres tall, with a climbing wall built to give the illusion of characters spinning around a rail.

Referencing original biomechanical designs by Swiss artist HR Giger, crafted versions of the xenomorphs in Alien: Romulus included a Bunraku puppet, a mechanical headpiece, puppets and creature suits.

Referencing the fictional firearm created for director James Cameron’s Aliens, Marshall played with scale for newer versions of gun prop designs by printing different sizes depending on the height of the actor, which he later cut out of foam core.

“The gun was one of my favourites, in the sense that we were doing a M41A Pulse Rifle and it could actually feel like the original,” said the designer.

Other recent films that follow an industrial design aesthetic include Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon and Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City.

The photography is by Naaman Marshall unless stated otherwise.

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Dezeen has teamed up with ASUS Zenbook to curate a major exhibition during London Design Festival exploring materiality, craftsmanship and artificial intelligence.

Titled Design You Can Feel, the exhibition will showcase how material qualities such as form, colour and texture can be combined to create objects or moments that awaken the senses.

Featured designers include Fernando Laposse, Giles Miller, Natural Material Studio, Niceworkshop and Studio Furthermore.

The exhibition will also include a specially commissioned piece by Future Facility, the design and research studio led by distinguished designers Kim Colin, Sam Hecht and Leo Leitner.

Exhibition to tell the story of Ceraluminum

At the heart of the exhibition will be an exploration of Ceraluminum, an innovative new material that’s used to create the distinct visual identity of the ASUS Zenbook series of laptops.

Ceraluminum combines the lightness of metal with the resilience of ceramics through an aluminium ceramisation process, resulting in a new proprietary material with distinctive nature-inspired hues that make each object unique.

Unlike traditional aluminium anodisation, the process eliminates volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and heavy metals and results in a 100-per-cent recyclable material.

This will be presented alongside work by other leading designers and curated around themes that speak to the qualities of Ceraluminum and showcase ASUS’s approach to design.

A celebration of ASUS Zenbook

The Design You Can Feel exhibition will celebrate Zenbook, the new range of laptops from ASUS.

These thin and light ultra-portable premium laptops have been crafted with the user in mind. The design features have been dictated by their use with the aim of seamlessly integrating beauty and function.

The laptops feature advanced (artificial intelligence) AI tools and are clad in the proprietary Ceraluminum material.

This light and durable material can be used to create unique, everlasting designs. Each of the pieces in the exhibition – which span furniture, lighting and installation design – will speak to these qualities in different ways, while Niceworkshop has produced a piece of furniture directly using the material.

The special commission by Future Facility will also be crafted from Ceraluminum.

Through this conceptual design, the studio will explore the relationship between the digital and physical worlds and ask how AI and materiality can change our relationship with technology.

Visitors to the exhibition will also be able to learn about the design story behind ASUS Zenbook and try out the AI tools it features for themselves.

Design You Can Feel takes place during LDF

Design You Can Feel will run from 17 to 22 September at Protein Studios in Shoreditch during London Design Festival.

More details of the exhibition, including details of the work on display, will be announced in the coming weeks at: dezeen.com/designyoucanfeel.

The exhibition graphic at the top of this post is by My Beautiful City, which used the generative AI tool Midjourney to create the imagery. You can see Dezeen’s policy on AI here.

London Design Festival 2024

London Design Festival 2024 takes place from 16-22 September 2024. See our London Design Festival 2024 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks taking place throughout the week.

Partnership content

The Design You Can Feel exhibition is a partnership between Dezeen and ASUS Zenbook. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

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Panels of translucent fibreglass envelop this multi-level stage designed by Cake Architecture for London arts and music festival Rally, revealing the reusable scaffolding structure at its heart.

Named Agnes after American abstract painter Agnes Martin, the stage was designed to resemble a giant canvas and is surrounded by 40-metre-long, seven-metre-high walls on two sides.

As part of the day-long festival, these walls helped to create a long, narrow enclosure much like a mini-nightclub in London’s Southwark Park, with an elevated DJ booth and stage in the centre.

Using a rentable, demountable scaffolding system, the walls were elevated three metres off the ground, allowing the audience to flow freely into and around the stage.

Two raised platforms on either end also allowed festivalgoers to climb up into the structure, effectively surrounding the performer on all sides.

“It’s quite different to just a big stage that faces outwards,” said Cake Architecture director Hugh Scott Moncrieff, who describes the stage as a two-storey building complete with a small roof. “It feels like you’re somehow inside a club.”

The narrow architecture of the stage, which is just eight meters wide, was informed both by its compact site in Southwark Park and by the layout of the nearby Dilston Gallery – a former church that at the time of its construction in 1911 was England’s first poured-concrete building.

“It’s just one big, long space with a raised pulpit up at one side,” Scott Moncrieff told Dezeen. “So it seemed interesting to start testing something long and linear, that felt a little bit like a church for a congregation of music fans.”

To save costs for the grassroots festival and ensure the stage could be reused year after year, Cake Architecture designed Agnes to be fully demountable using a modular scaffolding system rented from a stage production company in Germany.

“The material we’re cladding it in is called GRP, glass-reinforced plastic, which is obviously not necessarily a renewable product,” he said. “But, the idea is that it gets packed up every year and the stage still exists in five years or more.”

“So it’s not being trashed and thrown in the bin, which happens a lot with temporary builds.”

Typically, this modular scaffolding would be hidden layers of painted plywood. But Cake Architecture used translucent plastic cladding to allow the structure to shine through and illustrate the DIY ethos of Rally, which spotlights local London venues and artists.

“It’s about exposing the guts of what these structures are made of,” Scott Moncrieff said.

Sections of the fibreglass were covered in red and blue vinyl, creating a sequence of colour across the facade that references the repetitive grids found in the work of Martin.

“The whole point is that observing her work is kind of a meditation,” Scott Moncrieff said. “I think that translates in an interesting way to what we’re trying to do with this stage.”

“I’m hoping it will feel like a very large artwork,” he added.

Rows of colourful baton lights were installed along the length of the stage, illuminating the translucent facade like a lantern and sparkling off the minuscule glass fibres suspended in the plastic.

The Cake Architecture team built Agnes alongside a “ragtag group of makers and fabricators who become festival builders for the weekend”, Scott Moncrieff said.

“It’s not our typical day-to-day wheelhouse at all, but it’s been fun,” he explained.

Cake Architecture previously created a smaller stage for the inaugural Rally festival last year – a kind of “dance music bandstand” called Visionnaire, which also returned for the 2024 edition.

Elsewhere across London, the studio has worked on a number of buzzy nightlife projects including A Bar with Shapes for a Name in Hoxton and Soho cocktail bar SOMA, as well as spearheading the upcoming refurbishment and extension of east London club The Pickle Factory.

The photography is by Angelina Nikolayeva, Rory Gaylor and Jake Davis.

Rally took place at London’s Southwark Park in London on 24 August 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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British studio David Chipperfield Architects has completed the Hertogensite residential complex in Leuven, Belgium, with a series of interconnected brick-clad forms.

Situated on a narrow site between a fragment of the city’s medieval wall and a branch of the river Dyle, the complex comprises a 14-storey tower, nine townhouses and a small apartment block united “into one coherent building”.

“The design process was influenced by two main questions: how to tie together three different typologies into one coherent building, and how the building should respond to its unique surroundings,” said David Chipperfield Architects associate Julien Gouiric.

“The townhouses, a small apartment building and a tower were unified by the architectural expression of each unit,” he told Dezeen.

Hertogensite sits at the centre of a masterplan involving the redevelopment of a former hospital campus, which aims to reintegrate the site into the surrounding city.

Grey-toned brick cladding is used throughout the 8,000-square-metre complex to unify its three typologies, while also emphasising their sculptural character.

Rising above the apartment block and townhouses, the tower is intended as a symbol of the new neighbourhood and can be seen within the Leuven skyline.

Two apartments are hosted on each floor of the tower, while a penthouse sits at the top. Its lower floors are connected to a park and its upper floors look towards the city centre.

Geometric cut-outs in the tower host inset balconies that alternate on either side of the tower – reflecting the height of each apartment unit.

“The mirroring of balconies resulted in openings in each corner, a key design move to make the building omnidirectional,” Gouiric said.

Sandwiched between Hertogensite’s tower and apartment block is the row of nine townhouses, each featuring similarly blocky forms with inset and protruding balconies.

The townhouses step up in plan from three storeys at the front to four storeys at the rear, where private gardens overlook a branch of the river Dyle.

“The stepping in plan of the townhouses enriches their relationship with the medieval wall, alleviating the narrow street in between,” Gouiric said.

Bookending the Hertogensite development is the four-storey apartment block, which contains smaller flats, while also forming a connection between the townhouses and an existing building on the site.

Other residential buildings recently featured on Dezeen include an east London estate regeneration that draws on Scandinavian design principles and a cooperative housing block near Zurich that references “robust” industrial structures.

The photography is by Maxime Delvaux.

Project credits:

Architect: David Chipperfield Architects
Client: Resiterra nv
Directors: Benito Blanco, David Chipperfield, Mattias Kunz, Billy Prendergast
Project architect: Julien Gouiric
Team: Katie Jackson, Kelvin Jones, Peter Jurschitzka, Nayem Mohammad, Ele Mun, Jusin Park, Renato Pimenta, Joana Ribeiro, Gabor Tajnafoi, Oliver Ulmer
Local architect: Bureau Bouwtechniek
Structural engineer: Establis
MEP consultant: Creteq
Facade consultant: Bureau Bouwtechniek
Quantity surveyor: Bureau Bouwtechniek
General contractor: Vandeobos
Landscape architect: Wirtz International Landscape Architects

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