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April 14, 2015

Jerwood Gallery in Blueprint

As the Jerwood Gallery reaches it's third birthday, James Pallister's recent article in Blueprint offers a moment to reflect on it as one of the successes of a recent "boom in the building of large-scale art galleries in English regional centres," both as a building "which will be valued for years to come" and in placing it amongst contemporaries such as Tate Liverpool, the Baltic in Gateshead, Turner Contemporary in Margate and Colchester's own Firstsite in creating a shift away from London centrism and towards regeneration for these other towns and cities.

"The Jerwood complements the existing string of galleries on the south-east coast comprising Eastbourne's Towner, Bexhill's De La Warr Pavilion and Chichester's Pallant House." We're really pleased that the Gallery continues to have an impact on a local and national level.

April 14, 2015

Hana joins Creative Colchester board

We are used to fielding questions about why we set up our practice here in Colchester, rather than in London. There are lots of reasons for that - some random, some conscious - and we are both nourished and challenged by our location.

As part of that it's really important to us that we are engaged locally on a variety of levels, both professional and personal. From being a school governor (Tom) to being a trustee of a local music festival (Hana), from our work with Hythe Forward to supporting the St Botolphs crew, the role of 'citizen architect' is an important part of our identity.

I'm really happy to have been invited to join the renewed Creative Colchester board, which brings together institutions and practitioners to advise on the strategic direction and investment priorities to support the arts and creative business sectors in the borough. It's early days yet, and an earlier version of this steering group had a rather stuttering trajectory, but I hope that we can band together and make this something that really does push forward the town's agenda.

April 1, 2015

Gasworks starts on site

We're very excited to be on site with the renewal of the wonderful Gasworks art gallery and studio complex in south London. It's been a long process to get to this point, as is typical for non-profit arts projects, but the Gasworks team have done an incredible job in building support and funding for the project, which really will be transformative for an organisation that already punches above its weight.

So now the Victorian building has been stripped right back to basics and is being slowly put back together again. So far, getting the scaffolding up has revealed the brickwork is in worse shape than hoped (showing why you should never repoint old brickwork with hard cement mortar, and why when you do repoint, you must rake out the joints sufficiently), but the timber roof structure is in better nick. And there are some decidedly odd steelwork junctions where the original builders clearly had a bodge moment. Who says the Victorians always built really well! There's also a bit of amusing 'repointing' on the street facade where someone filled it in with silicon mastic rather than mortar.

But it's all coming together, and it was wonderful to tour some of the patrons and funders of the project around just before Easter. We'll post more photos in due course.

January 13, 2015

Shoreditch Town Hall on site

Usually the construction industry is completely shut-down for the full 2 weeks over Christmas. This year we've broken that golden rule by starting a project on site literally days before Christmas. The next phase of work at Shoreditch Town Hall started as soon as the Christmas events programme started to ease up, and is cramming in the installation of a new goods lift and extended WCs over the winter quiet period. This is at the same time as the previous phase - reinstating the balcony tiering and seating that will make the Assembly Hall an 800-seat venue - is coming to completion, and the foyer is being repainted at long last.

Above shows 1930's terrazzo wall panelling that had been hidden under layers of paint, being exposed in the WCs. Who says toilets can't be glamorous!

December 2, 2014

The outdoor classroom - in use!

We've finally got round to getting our photographer friend Jim Stephenson to come and take some lovely photos of the outdoor classroom in use. The kids were very excited to be photographed, despite the extremely cold November day, and we think their enthusiasm for the project really comes across!

October 14, 2014

Hana Loftus appointed to South East Design Review Panel

We're delighted to share that Hana Loftus has been appointed to the South East Design Review Panel run by Design South East. She joins a pool of talented and experienced professionals from across the built environment disciplines on the refreshed Panel, following the merger of the South-East and Eastern Region design review panels and a call for new members.

The Design Panel aims to help raise the quality of development in the South East and East of England through the provision of timely, expert and independent design advice to local authorities, developers and design teams through a discursive process of critical appraisal of development proposals. The Panel reviews a wide range of development proposals, from large town centre sites and urban extensions to sensitive rural development.

June 12, 2014

Outdoor classroom: finished, clean and waiting...

The outdoor classroom we've built for Fordham primary school is all finished and awaiting its official opening at the school fete on Saturday. Most of the work was done over half-term - frustatingly, not all of it, partly due to the atrocious weather for a couple of days, and partly due to the learning curve on a few things - but learning new skills is half the point of us doing a project like this. We've finished it off gradually on a few evenings after work (thanking the long light summer nights) and now its all ready for use!

We thought it might be interesting to post a bit about how the outdoor classroom was built. First was setting out and digging the footings trench - thanks to a local neighbour with a digger who dug it all for free. Concrete strip foundations (all mixed on site and poured via wheelbarrow as a concrete truck couldn't get close) were done pretty quickly. Then blockwork to form the basis for the circular bench - as the structure is half dug into an existing earth mound, we couldn't just build it all in timber. The steel posts that hold up the roof slot were slotted through the holes in the concrete blocks and then the holes were backfilled with concrete - the posts had holes in them so that the concrete would penetrate and hold the posts securely in place.

The perimeter beam and rafters had all been pre-cut by one of our team and brilliantly all fitted perfectly apart from one which required a bit of tweaking - bolted into steel column caps that had been made at cost by a local fabricator. Then the sarking for the hyperbolic roof (pre-painted by us and our kids in different shades of blue on the underside) were nailed on. The slatted approach enabled us to use the capacity of narrow tongue-and-groove boards to curve to the shape and again, worked brilliantly. The timber cladding to the blockwork was simply decking boards fixed to battens that were Hilti-gun-fixed to the blockwork. More decking on timber frames formed the bench, and yet more decking for the floor deck, onto simple timber joists. Under the deck, we had dug two small soakaways to deal with rainwater. Lastly the roof was coated in GRP - this bit definitely taking a bit longer than expected - which was wrapped over the perimeter to form a drip. Getting this edge neat involved a bit of sanding and filling but we got there in the end. Then staining the timber wall and bench, returfing and shaping the landscape around it, and a very good clean and touch-up.

The classroom is sized so a class of 30 can all sit around the bench and when our team had our first lunch sitting in the structure, it felt like a really sociable space and the height of the bench back/plinth worked perfectly in terms of both sheltering and still allowing views over the top to the horizon of rolling fields beyond. The two openings into the shelter relate to the existing buildings and paths on one side, and on the other is nicely aligned with the kick-off spot on the football pitch.

We're really excited about how the kids are going to use the shelter - from somewhere to eat packed lunches in the summer, to more educational benefits, allowing the school to fulfill its ambition for the amount of time kids spend outdoors, and as a space for storytelling, creative work and environmental engagement. Clichéd as it may sound, the circular form feels intrinsically suited to telling tales - perhaps only lacking a hearth in the centre, but fire on school grounds is a little hard to justify!

The project cost £6500 in materials, thanks to at-cost materials from several local suppliers, and we estimate around £4000 in labour that we undertook free of charge - about 10 working days for a team of 5, not beyond the reach of many practices to undertake alongside their regular work. We haven't estimated the design time, but it was pretty efficiently done. It has been really fantastic to undertake a project like this in our locality with the minimum of fuss. Our experience at the Rural Studio in Alabama has been much in our mind, as are the comments from many on this side of the Atlantic that it is impossible to replicate similar community-build projects here due to legislation, health and safety, etc etc. We feel that this project shows that - if you really are trusted and rooted in your community, as the Rural Studio is - it is possible to do meaningful, permanent projects without becoming bogged down in box-ticking.

If our architectural skills are to have any relevance, surely it is through undertaking projects (big and small) not for 'educated clients', but that are perceived to be both useful and beautiful by a 'normal' community. This is a direct test of this question, and we now wait to see whether our efforts have made something that works, is appreciated and is felt to have a quality beyond the ordinary. We're looking forward to see how it is used and received by the children and parents on Saturday and beyond.

May 22, 2014

Fordham outdoor classroom starts on site

For the last few months we've been working with Hana and Tom's local primary school, which their children attend, to design a new outdoor classroom. The project started when the school's PTA, Friends of Fordham, announced that they had raised funding to purchase a generic outdoor shelter structure to act as an outdoor classroom for the school. We offered to use the same budget to create a structure that would be unique and special to the school, co-designed with the pupils and staff, and built by ourselves as a pro bono project.

It's been a fantastic process, involving the children and staff fully in a number of ways. The whole school undertook a half-term project in the Spring term to kick off the design process, each child producing a model, drawing or in some cases a whole project report of what they imagined an outdoor classroom might be. Some wonderful ideas emerged and beautiful creations. We then held a workshop that explored making and construction through making rolled-newspaper structures and spaghetti towers, as well as allowing each child to present their half-term project.

Following some design work by us, we then presented three options to the whole school for their input. A brilliant conversation developed, with children commenting on everything from the practical - how would the rainwater drain, how would it be safe? - to the spatial - views of the sky and grounds, position on the site, enclosure and shelter vs openness and flexibility. From this we developed a final design that takes the form of a simple circular plan, partly inset into an existing grassy mound in the grounds, sheltered by a hyperbolic 'pringle' roof (apologies to the Olympic Velodrome, and thanks to our brilliant engineering collaborators Momentum for helping with making this work!)

Today school finished for half-term and we started to build the structure. It's a real community effort, with our neighbour Paul Richardson doing the excavation for free, local metalworkers Wesbroom Engineering making the steelwork at cost, and materials supplied at a good discount from local builders' merchants Kent Blaxill. Fingers crossed for decent weather over the next week, and we'll be updating you with pictures of us looking unusually sweaty as we hopefully have the shelter ready for when the children return after half-term!

April 13, 2014

RIBA Awards success

We were surprised and very delighted that High House Artists' Studios was awarded a RIBA Regional Award last week. Even more so that our client, High House Production Park/Thurrock Council, won Regional Client of the Year, which is very well deserved for Matthew Essex's fantastic vision, project management and determination to achieve a high quality of design fully integrated with interesting financial models for cultural industries workspace. The project was described as an "elegantly rational composition" and we're very happy that the aim of the project was so well understood.

We also won RIBA East Emerging Architect of the Year, in recognition of the quality of our work across the board, which feels like a great achievement.

We've recently got some fantastic shots of the Studios in use from Hugo Glendinning. Proper photoset to follow but seeing as it's timely, a taster above. Wonderful to see art and mess being made in the studios, it's what the project is all about.

March 18, 2014

High House Artists' Studios shortlisted for RIBA East award

We're delighted that High House Artists' Studios has been shortlisted for a RIBA East award this year. It's a bit of a surprise, to be honest, as it is quite uncompromising building in many ways, certainly a long way from some of the elegant houses and eye-catching public buildings that are usually award-winners. On a really tight budget, and working hand-in-glove with the studios' operator Acme in realising their business model for keeping rents genuinely affordable, we strove to not only create an economic and efficient building but also to explore the unusual typology of a new-build studio complex and what kind of architecture might be appropriate for it.

We showed the judges round last week and it was with a great deal of pride that both Acme's director Jonathan Harvey and myself could show them into a fully occupied building that now really demonstrates the need for affordable studio space, that unusual locations like Purfleet can really work for the artistic community, and that the building meets this need really well. The studios are messy, creative, customised, and full of life, which is exactly as it should be. Hugo Glendinning, a photographer commissioned by Acme to document the life of the studios, has also recently returned to photograph the studios in use and we're looking forward to sharing his images here soon.