Shortlisted: RIBA Regional Award and AJ Retrofit Award, 2020
In 2019 we completed a new £3.5m supporters centre for the Science Museum, created from a former Royal Mail sorting office and yard behind the main concourse of the museum. The Smith Centre was conceived as a generous, inviting 'salon' for socialising, events, lectures and dinners, reviving and restoring the original materials and form of the Sorting Office. These now form an elegant, richly coloured sequence of rooms including a number of smaller meeting rooms and a new boardroom for the Museum, leading to a courtyard created from the delivery yard, which is partly sheltered by the original Victorian glazed roof.
We complemented the palette of found materials - glazed brick, parquet, steel and timber carefully restored - with new elements that are simple but finely detailed, to create a salon atmosphere complemented by displays of unusual objects from the Museum's collections - including a large-scale oil painting, a dramatic ship model, a spacesuit and a rocket - all helping to show the breadth of the Museum's heritage. Alongside this project, we also undertook the refurbishment of the Groups Entrance for the Museum.
