Hasta La Ideas

Architects Stanton Williams have completed a new campus for art and design college Central Saint Martins in and around a Victorian granary and two former transit sheds in London.

Two new four-storey buildings provide studio blocks between the two 180 metre-long sheds, one of which now houses workshops.

Cycle stores are located in historic horse stables below this eastern shed, while shops and bars now occupy the ground floor of the western shed.

Four-storey-high concrete walls frame the main entrance to the college, which leads into an internal street with overhead bridges and an arched, clear plastic roof.

A performing arts centre located at the end of this street contains a 350-seat theatre for student performances.

The refurbished former granary now houses a library and faces a public square currently under construction.

Past projects by students at the University of the Arts college include functionless objects for unpredicted needs and rockers made from found chairs – see all our stories about Central Saint Martins here.

Stanton Williams also recently completed another UK university building – see our earlier story here about a research laboratory at Cambridge.

Photography is by Hufton + Crow, apart from where otherwise stated.

Here’s a more detailed description from Stanton Williams:

New University of the Arts London Campus Central Saint Martins at King’s Cross

To the north of King’s Cross and St Pancras International railway stations, 67-acres of derelict land are being transformed in what is one of Europe’s largest urban regeneration projects.

The result will be a vibrant mixed-use quarter, at the physical and creative heart of which will be the new University of the Arts London campus, home of Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design.

Stanton Williams’ design for the £200m new campus unites the college’s activities under one roof for the first time. It provides Central Saint Martins with a substantial new building, connected at its southern end to the Granary Building, a rugged survivor of the area’s industrial past.

The result is a state-of-the-art facility that not only functions as a practical solution to the college’s needs but also aims to stimulate creativity, dialogue and student collaboration.

A stage for transformation, a framework of flexible spaces that can be orchestrated and transformed over time by staff and students where new interactions and interventions, chance and experimentation can create that slip-steam between disciplines, enhancing the student experience. The coming together of all the schools of Central Saint Martins will open up that potential.

The design aims to maximise the connections between departments within the building, with student and material movement being considered 3-dimensionally, as a flow diagram North to South, East to West, and up and down – similar in many ways to how the grain was distributed around the site using wagons and turntables.

King’s Cross offered a unique opportunity: a large site within what promises to be a creative and cultural hub, connected (via King’s Cross Station and the restored St Pancras International) not only to the rest of Britain but also to mainland Europe, plus the chance to develop a robust contemporary architectural response to the boldness of the existing buildings on the site.

The Granary Building itself has been restored as the main ‘front’ of the college, facing a new public square that steps down to the Regent’s Canal. The building was designed in 1851 to receive grain from the wheat fields of Lincolnshire, unloaded here from railway wagons onto canal boats for onward transport to the capital’s bakeries.

It comprises a solid, six-storey cubic mass, with an unadorned, 50-metre wide brick elevation, extended to 100-metres by office additions flanking the building. To the north, located one to each side of the Granary Building, are two parallel 180 metres long Transit Sheds.

The design strategy retains the Granary Building, adapted to include functions such as the college’s library, while the Eastern Transit Shed behind is converted to create spectacular workshops for the college. Within the street-level openings of the Western Transit Shed, new shops and bars will add further life to the area. The historic horse stables below the Eastern Transit Sheds have been transformed to new cycle stores for students and staff.

The bulk of the college’s accommodation, however, is located in a major addition to the site, two substantial new studio buildings that occupy the space between the two transit sheds and which, at the North end of the site present a contemporary elevation to the surrounding area. The scale of the new addition responds closely to that of the Granary Building, essentially continuing its massing along the length of the site. It rises above the level of the transit sheds, using contemporary materials so that it will stand, beacon-like, as a symbol of the college’s presence within this rapidly-evolving part of London.

The two new four storey studio buildings are arranged at either side of a covered central ‘street’, some 110m long, 12m wide and 20m high, covered by a translucent ETFE roof and punctuated by a regular rhythm of service cores that accommodate lifts, stairs and toilets. At the northern end, a new centre for the Performing Arts will house a fully equipped theatre complete with fly-tower as well as rehearsal and teaching spaces.

The internal ‘street’ has been conceived as a dynamic area, an arena for student life, akin to the much-loved stair at the centre of the college’s previous main building. Bridges linking the various cores and workspaces cross it, offering break-out areas for meeting, relaxing and people-watching and exchanging ideas.

The street will be used for exhibitions, fashion shows and performances, the spaces being large enough to build temporary pavilions for example. Viewing points allow students to watch others working or performing, and the work of other disciplines can be seen and exhibited.

At the southern end of the new block and running parallel with the north end of the Granary Building is a second covered ‘street’, offering public access through this part of the building interior. Lifts rising through this space recall the vertical movement of grain, which gave the complex its original purpose.

Flooring details either retain existing turntables or hint at their historic location, while within the Granary Building itself, the hoists have been retained, crowning a newly inserted lightwell. Simple glazing maintain the integrity of the unbroken openings, rhythmically punctuating the Granary Building’s main façade.

The new University of the Arts London campus is one of the first parts of the King’s Cross development to be completed. As such, it not only provides Central Saint Martins with the flexible and dynamic spaces that it needs to educate and develop the artists and designers of the future, but also makes a firm statement of the role of the Arts in the quarter, to which it will give critical mass and energy.

Project Details:

The £200m campus brings together 4,000 Central Saint Martins students and 1,000 staff under one roof. It is made up of:
• 10 acres of floor space
• Over 1.3 million timber blocks
• Enough concrete to fill eight Olympic swimming pools
The three-storey building is based around an internal street, naturally lit through a translucent roof.
It contains four levels of multi-purpose workshops and specialist studios, including:
• Performance design and practice labs
• Casting, wood fabrication and metal fabrication workshops
• Post-production workshops
• Film, effects and sound studios
• Architecture and spatial studios
• Fashion and textiles studios
• Photography studios and darkrooms
• Product and industrial design studios
• Graphic and communication design studios • Jewellery workshops
• Art studios

The campus is also home to a 350 seat public theatre with its own entrance.

Above: Photography is by John Sturrock

It occupies the Grade II listed Granary Building, built in 1851, which managed the storage and distribution of grain at the height of the Victorian industrial boom.

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It faces onto Granary Square which, when completed in June 2012, will be one of London’s largest public squares.

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The campus has been designed by architects Stanton Williams and forms part of King’s Cross, a 67 acre development in central London – a new piece of the city with a brand new postcode, London N1C. King’s Cross is being developed by the King’s Cross Central Limited Partnership, which brings together Argent Group, London & Continental Railways and DHL Supply Chain.

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Key Values:

Project Value: £200M (based on cost of land, building, fit-out and expansion incl. third floor)

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Key dates:

Construction Start date: January 2008
Completion Date: April 2011
Date of Occupation: August 2011
Construction phase: January 2008 – August 2011 (Incl. fit-out) Student arrival: 3rd October 2011
Building Details
Postal Address: Granary Building, 1 Granary Square, London, N1C 4AA Gross Internal Area: approx. 40,000m2

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Design team:

Site Developer: Argent
Tenant: University of the Arts London
Architect: Stanton Williams
Structure: Scott Wilson
Environmental / M&E engineering: Atelier 10
Architectural lighting: Spiers and Major
Quantity Surveyor / Employer’s Agent: Davis Langdon
Landscape Architect: Townsend Landscape Architects.

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Facade consultant: Arup Facades Engineering
CDM coordinator: Scott Wilson.
Contractor team – base build
Main contractor: Bam Construction Limited
Contractor’s Architect: Bam Design (new buildings) / Weedon Partnership (Granary)
Conservation Architect: Richard Griffiths Architects

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Structure: Bam Design (new buildings) AKS Lister Beare (existing structure)
M&E engineering: Bam Design
Fire consultant: Aecom
Acoustic consultant: Sandy Brown Associates
Access consultant: All Clear Design
Contractor team – fit-out
Contractor: Overbury
Interior fit-out Architect: Pringle Brandon

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Sainsbury Laboratory by Stanton Williams	School of Management by Adjaye Associates	Marne College by Wind Architecten Adviseurs

Architects 00:/ and Space Station have designed digital advert-covered offices to straddle Old Street roundabout, located down the road from Dezeen’s offices in London and dubbed Silicon Roundabout due to the number of technology companies and start-ups in the area.

Startup City would accommodate start-up businesses directly above Old Street tube station. Digital adverts would flash across the faceted exterior of the office block, interrupted only by windows.

The electronic canvas would be one of the most expensive advertising spaces in the capital, available for rent per pixel per minute. Behind the walls, the building would enclose a ground-level public square containing station entrances, a big screen, market stalls and cafes.

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Other recent architecture projects in London include a fire-damaged former market hall converted into Corten-clad university offices and a house clad in flint, timber and lead – see more projects in London here.

The following information is from the architects:

London-based design practice 00:/ ∫(‘zero zero’), in partnership with Space Station, have published proposals for the redevelopment of the Old Street roundabout in East London. The proposals outline a new enterprise and start-up institution at the central hub of Old Street, Hoxton and Shoreditch; an area which in recent years has been dubbed ‘Silicon Roundabout’ due to the rising success of new technology and .com enterprises concentrated in the area.

At a time when much of the economic and employment news in the UK makes for gloomy reading, Silicon Roundabout stands out as a remarkable success story, with a number of successful British technology companies emerging in one small area, and myriad new start-ups seeking to establish themselves in the area.Yet the roundabout which gave its name to this phenomenon remains, by contrast, unloved and fallow but for a small number of popular shops which inhabit the concrete underpass.

Boosted by government support for the ‘Tech City’ emerging in the East of London, the effort is now on to bring together investors, backers and the tech community to build upon this emerging London success story. “The roundabout is a landmark opportunity to articulate and amplify what is happening in the area”, explains Space Station director Russell Chopp.

Space Station is widely acknowledged as one of the pioneers for the regeneration of Shoreditch since 1997 working closely with many of the successful founding .com and media start up companies that originally moved into Shoreditch in the late 1990’s.

Architecture and strategic design practice 00:/, themselves based in the area, have led the design for the proposals. 00:/ are established leaders in innovative enterprise environments and future workspaces: having been co-designers and partners behind the Hub network in London, which provides collaborative workspace for social entrepreneurs. Not surprisingly then, their proposals go far beyond the kind of corporate office design often associated with business campuses.

“It’s partly about realising why this place is already successful in the first place”, explain 00:/. “This is an economy which works in a completely different way, it’s far more open, far more sociable. It’s about the aggregation of many small, energetic, and rapidly growing start-ups with a sharing culture rather than the single, large corporate setup which has driven the design of the office buildings we got used to during the boom.”

Their proposal has a number of key distinctive features. First, the base of the structure is not a corporate lobby or a shopping mall, but a large, enclosed public space.

“In a sense, London already has another major public space, sitting there, waiting to be found, used and loved” say the designers. “It should be something like a cross between Trafalgar Square and Grand Central Terminal in NewYork.”

The design has to respond to the very tight constraints of building around an existing underground and railway station, located at the centre of one of London’s busiest traffic junctions. Its structure and construction would have to be strongly shaped by these factors.

The resultant building, sitting astride this new public space, could not be more different from the glass office buildings of the City of London a few hundred metres further south. Not a series of floor plates, but a kind of city-within-a-city.

Within this compact city would be workspaces for companies which range in size from large to tiny, as well as shared resources and flexible workspaces for start-up enterprises of only one or two people.

On the outside, the faceted facade is a vast, programmable advertising board, reminiscent of Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. “We’re told the advertising space on the roundabout is some of the most expensive in Britain. Rather than resist that, we saw an opportunity in turning that onto its head, by opening the whole thing up. By selling the façade per pixel, per minute, the building creates a system which allows small, local companies, individuals and online campaigns to use it, alongside the big global players.”The result is a kind of neighbourhood- based ‘million-dollar homepage’, reflecting outwardly the energetic entrepreneurialism which is driving the change in this part of London.

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Office Building VDAB by BOB361	Offices by Barbosa & Guimaraes	10 Hills Place by AL_A

Architects Casper Mueller Kneer have converted a south London warehouse into the city’s third White Cube gallery.

White Cube Bermondsey is considerably larger than the galleries in St. James’s and Shoreditch and contains three separate exhibition areas.

These areas comprise one space known as the South Galleries, a set of three rooms collectively known as the North Galleries and top-lit cube-shaped gallery called 9x9x9.

The building also houses an auditorium, archive, storage warehouse, bookshop and private viewing rooms.

A new canopy projects out from the engineering-brick exterior to shelter the gallery entrance.

Other interesting gallery spaces worth a look include one in Japan with a softly curved shape and sliced entranceway and another in London inside a former office building – see more stories about galleries here.

Photography is by Ben Westoby.

The following text was provided by the White Cube Gallery and the architects:

White Cube Bermondsey

144–152 Bermondsey Street is an existing warehouse and office building, set back from Bermondsey Street via an entrance yard. The building dates from the 1970s and has a modernist industrial appearance, with long horizontal window bands and a simple cubic shape. The outer walls of the building are constructed from dark brown engineering brick, with a concrete and steel framed internal structure.

“We were attracted by the dimensions of the original building, the deep views of up to 70 m”, Jens Casper says. “We tried to adopt these deep views for the Gallery Building. For us the project is a play of light, volumes and proportional relationships set against a raw material palette. Geometrically, each space is in itself very simple, yet the sequence of spaces creates a complex ensemble and rich spatial experience for the visitor.”

Materially, the industrial character of the building was maintained and enhanced by new additions and modifications. The structure was generally retained, but opened up towards Bermondsey Street. The entrance, reception, delivery areas and front yard were substantially modified and a new canopy has been introduced. The new entrance yard is enclosed by a sequence of 151 vertical steel fins along Bermondsey Street.

Internally, a series of new spaces were created – both public and private functions are organised around a central corridor which is 70 m long. Tube lights mounted onto raw-steel mesh ceiling panels provide this space with a distinct rhythm.

There are three principal exhibition spaces of varying proportions and light conditions, offering flexibility in the scale and nature of the artworks that can be installed:
‘9x9x9’ is a centrally located cubic space with a 9 m high ceiling. It has a translucent fabric ceiling and is flooded with natural light. The ‘South Galleries’, the largest display area, provides 780 m2 of column-free space. They are fitted with stretch ceiling panels and track lights, are part day-lit and sub-dividable. The ‘North Galleries’ are smaller and more experimental in character with fluorescent lighting. A 60 seat auditorium allows the presentation of films and lectures in blackout conditions.

Engineering and Construction

The new gallery spaces were inserted as self-supporting freestanding volumes, barely touching the envelope of the existing building.

The powerfloated concrete floors can take loadings up to 100 KN/m2. Walls and ceilings are constructed as steel cages allowing art to be installed at almost any point within the space.

Structural exclusion zones allow the punching through of walls at selected locations to allow entry points into the exhibition spaces to be coordinated with the ever-changing displays.

Doors are generally oversized to ease the transport of art between the spaces. The largest set of doors measures 4.3 m in height and 3.7 m in width. Large wall sections can be opened to allow the movement of works of art between the galleries, these operate around single points pivots measuring up to 5.4 x 3.2 m.

Materials

The materials that are set against the white gallery walls are industrial in character, often untreated and self-coloured. The floors are powerfloated natural grey concrete. Ceiling materials include stretch fabrics for viewing rooms and galleries. Untreated and powder- coated steel meshes are used for the public corridor, the new entrance canopy and the entrance divider. Doors are made from untreated mild steel or stainless steel and glass. Concrete, grey granite and steel dominate the external landscaping.

Information

White Cube Bermondsey provides more than 5440 m2 (58,000 sq ft) of interior space on a site of 1.7 acres (74,300 sq ft)

South Galleries – The largest display area with 780 m2 (8,400 sq ft)

North Galleries- Each of the three separate exhibition spaces known collectively as the ‘North Galleries’ will be 80 m2 (850 sq ft)

9x9x9 – This gallery is naturally top-lit and measures 81 m2

The building also includes substantial warehousing, private viewing rooms, an archive room, an auditorium and a bookshop.
White Cube Mason’s Yard and Hoxton Square

White Cube Mason’s Yard provides more than 1110 m2 (11,900) sq ft of interior space. The Lower Ground Floor gallery is 220 m2 (2,370 sq ft). The Ground Floor gallery is 85 m2 (925 sq ft)

White Cube Hoxton Square provides more than 890 m2 (9,500 sq ft) of interior space. The Ground Floor gallery is 160 m2 (1,700 sq ft). The First Floor gallery is 40 m2 (400 sq ft)

The White Cube Bermondsey Exhibition Programme for 2012-2013 will include Anselm Kiefer, Gilbert & George, Damien Hirst, Zhang Huan and Mark Bradford.

Project Team

Architect: Casper Mueller Kneer
Services Engineers: Bob Costello Associates
Structural Engineer: Atelier One
Fire Safety Consultants: Ramboll UK
CDM Consultants: Goddard Consulting
Project Managers: Millbridge Group
Quantity Surveyors: Millbridge Group
Executive Architects: RHWL Architects
Acoustic Consultants: BDP
Main Contractor: Life Build Solutions

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Gallery by XTEN Architecture	Tanada piece gallery by Geneto	Art Gallery by Morphogenesis

The English fashion label’s earthquake-inspired Spring 2012 collection

In keeping with their commitment to the ongoing intermingling of fashion and art, British design duo Zowie Broach and Brian Kirkby of Boudicca recently presented their Spring 2012 collection alongside a performance of Mike Figgis’ “Just Tell the Truth.” Continuing to evolve, the label still follows the artistic roots first planted in 1997, when they showed their collections exclusively in galleries.

Boudicca worked with two ballet dancers and a pianist on the event, which showcased fluid, semi-transparent neon leggings and dresses against a backdrop of sketches on canvas.

Broach and her partner, citing inspiration from tectonic motion and massive collisions, focused on the idea that “nothing is solid.” Such abstract notions translate to clothing in bursts of acid green on black, crinkled collars in sophisticated silhouettes and metallic-threaded fabrics showing the wearer’s movement in how they crease. Elegant evening dresses feature soft, black Lurex, and sharply-tailored asymmetry in blouses with only one sleeve and jagged hemlines reflect a “glitch” concept.

Boudicca sells from Barneys New York and online at Project No. 8.

London architects Buckley Gray Yeoman have converted a fire-damaged former market hall in Shoreditch into Corten-clad university offices.

The Grade-I listed Moorish Market building sheltered street traders at the start of the twentieth century for just four years before it was closed down.

The glass and Corten steel extension rises up behind the original facade, adding two additional floors to the two-storey building.

Concrete walls in the atrium of the Fashion Street building remain exposed, while glass balustrades surround mezzanine balconies.

We’ve published a number of Corten-clad buildings on Dezeen in recent weeks, including a winery in the south of France and a see-through church in Belgium – see all our stories featuring weathered steel here.

Photography is by Hufton + Crow.

The following information is from Buckley Gray Yeoman:

Situated within the trendy City fringe of East London, Buckley Gray Yeoman’s redevelopment and refurbishment of this former Moorish Market provides four floors of new University accommodation and a striking addition to this fashionable area of London.

The existing Grade ll listed building required extensive work, following a major fire which demolished the entire rear section of the structure. Buckley Gray Yeoman reinstated the original structure, whilst carefully retaining the original façade of the building that remained largely intact.

In order to maintain the unique character of the market, the practice’s approach to site was one of preservation rather than restoration. The new build element stands independently from the original building aspects, with each structure maintaining its own structural identity.

A layer of Corten steel is wrapped around the concrete framed building to provide a level of depth and layering to the façade, whilst responding to the rich urban industrial character and heritage of the area.

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This industrial palette is continued internally, where fully exposed in-situ concrete is complimented by warm Sapele timber panelling and glass balustrades across the atrium to allow top light to filter down throughout the building to ground level.

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C-Mine by 51N4E	Grifols Academy by TWO/BO and Luis Twose	Vol House by Estudio BaBO