Hackney Road Development, a building that fits comfortably within the site context
Hawkins\Brown
Housing
/
Completed
Hackney Road is an arterial route which runs from Shoreditch to Cambridge Heath, through an area of East London which has seen huge changes over the past ten years. However, much of the Hackney Road remains poor in terms of the quality of the accommodation and its architecture.
Hawkins\Brown has designed a new £30m mixed-use building for LBS on Hackney Road, replacing a disused former bingo hall, within the City Fringe Opportunity Area. Our design seeks to bring, through high quality architecture, some of the excitement and opportunity of Shoreditch further up the Hackney Road, improving the business and residential offer in this part of Hackney.
The scheme provides 8610 sq m (92675 sq ft) of space, with 860 sq m (9255 sq ft) of office space, which creates an active frontage onto Hackney Road, while residential units (83 homes occupy all other floors. Corten is used for the building’s external cladding, enabling the façade to adapt and change over time, developing a unique patina and creating a landmark building.
The scheme consists of a single building, J-shaped in plan, comprising two elements – a five storey podium and a five storey lantern tower above the plinth, set back towards the western side of the development. This combination of heights references the taller buildings in this part of Hackney, while addressing the scale of the domestic buildings on Hackney Road itself.
A courtyard at the first floor level, contains a 298sqm communal garden. A large communal amenity space on the fifth floor roof garden will be generously planted to complement the existing green areas and trees in the site context. The scheme will be car free and will provide extensive cycle storage facilities at ground and basement levels.
The scheme occupies a prominent location on Hackney Road, the principle route linking Shoreditch and Hackney. Buildings by some of the greatest modernist Architects sit along Hackney Road. Located within the Hackney Road Conservation Area and opposite the Jesus Hospital Estate Conservation Area, the planned building sits in the vicinity of listed modernist buildings by renowned architects, including Erno Goldfinger, Berthold Lubetkin and Sir Denys Lasdun. Our proposal draws inspiration from this architectural movement to create a development which sits comfortably next to these seminal buildings.
Hawkins\Brown’s design for the new development draws inspiration from this architectural movement to create a building that fits comfortably within the site context.
London
England
LBS Properties
05/2021
8610 mq
Hawkins\Brown
Architect: Hawkins\Brown Developer: LBS Properties
Tolent
Planning Consultants: DP9 Services Engineers and Sustainability Consultants: Atelier Ten Acoustic Consultants: Sandy Brown Daylight and Sunlight Consultants: GIA Heritage Advisers: Montagu Evans Structural Engineers: Heyne Tillett Steel
N/A
Francesco Montaguti
Curriculum
Serious about society. Human about architecture.
There’s a particular kind of special that Hawkins\Brown strives for: creating architecture that’s both incredibly serious in intention and refreshingly human in experience. That sounds like a contradiction, but what is the human condition if not a mishmash of paradoxical needs from the profound to the playful. Too much seriousness will suck the life out of a building, but disarm people and you have their attention. Hawkins\Brown is an internationally renowned practice of architects, designers and researchers, based in London, Manchester, Edinburgh and LA. We’re in the top 10 of the Architect’s Journal’s list of 100 UK practices. We’ve won the AJ100 Practice of the Year three times. We were shortlisted for the RIBA Stirling Prize for the redevelopment of the Park Hill Estate in Sheffield, and most recently, were winners of the 2020 RIBA President’s Award for Research for our development of the Hawkins\Brown Emission Reduction Tool.
