英国约克顿工场(2020)(Pearson Lloyd)设计

显示全部楼层 · 发表于 2020-12-22 13:09:46

Workshop, Renovation, London, United Kingdom

设计师描述 | Designer description： Thanks to the vision of Cassion Castle Architects and Pearson Lloyd, what was a dilapidated Victorian block in East London is now a dynamic modern studio, giving Pearson Lloyd a new permanent home in the heart of Hackney for their industry-leading design office. Spanning five former stables-turned-workshops on Yorkton Street, the new office is set in an area with a long association with making and manufacture. The restoration of Yorkton Workshops is an act of preservation, reinvigorating the area’s design heritage, and linking Pearson Lloyd to a lineage of making that dates back over a century. Spread over two storeys and two wings – a historic workshop building and a more recent warehouse structure – Yorkton Workshops encompasses a variety of spaces, including versatile studios, workshops for making and prototyping, meeting rooms, and a dedicated area for exhibitions and events.

When Pearson Lloyd acquired the building in 2017, it was a mess; a haphazard collision of old and new, with a mishmash of overlaid alterations and adaptations that had been made over the decades. Part of the Victorian building had been replaced with a modern utilitarian structure sometime in the 1990s, likely in response to a fire, leaving 6,000 sq ft of usable – but uninspiring – space. As a former workshop block that had housed an assortment of makers and craftspeople for centuries, it had a heritage that Luke Pearson and Tom Lloyd identified with and wished to continue, but it was ill-suited to the needs of a multi-faceted 21st-century design studio operating internationally.

The easiest approach would have been to knock it down and start from scratch, but Cassion Castle Architects and Pearson Lloyd agreed that restoring and retrofitting the building – although much more challenging and architecturally complex – would be a far more sustainable, low-carbon approach, as it would preserve the embodied carbon in the existing structure. On average, between a third and a half of a structure’s carbon emissions are concentrated in the construction phase, so the reuse of a building has significantly less impact than a new-build.

This determination to minimise environmental impact influenced the design approach from the outset; Pearson Lloyd and Cassion Castle Architects worked hard to minimise the demolition needed, the potential landfill generated and the new materials introduced. They ensured existing materials were retained or reused wherever possible, repurposing bricks, steelwork, and timber joists from the demolition phase, supplemented by materials sourced from reclamation yards wherever necessary. The floorboards, for example, were reclaimed from a Victorian factory site in Mile End. The retrofit approach was not only environmentally the right choice, but it also created the opportunity for a much richer interior.

The interplay of existing fabric and new material leads to hundreds of bespoke details for the design team to tackle and celebrate. Original brickwork seamlessly intersects with contemporary concrete and smooth sheets of birch plywood – a balanced and harmonious meeting of old and new at macro and micro scales.