Belgrove House has won a World Architecture Festival (WAF) award, with Tower Hamlets Town Hall and Montacute Yards both being highly commended in the built Civic and Community category and the built Office category respectively.
Winning a WAF Future Project Award in the Commercial mixed-use category, Belgrove House is a new-build specialised laboratory office building for the life-sciences sector located on Euston Road opposite King’s Cross and St Pancras stations. Designed to be innovative, highly sustainable and an example of carbon emissions reduction in construction, operation, and future refurbishment, the project offers an excellent opportunity to enhance the surrounding area. The building’s configuration emerges from a clear arrangement of uses on the site. Life-sciences research laboratories are located on the largest floorplates 1-3, providing animation to the facades and a public window into the research activity within. Offices will be located on floors 5-9 and the fourth floor will serve as a dedicated ‘collaboration hub’.
Tower Hamlets Town Hall transformed the Grade II listed Royal London Hospital into the new headquarters for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. Consolidating a number of the council’s offices into one location, the new town hall offers a broad range of public services to the borough’s residents, in a more accessible location in Whitechapel.
The restored 1750s building retains the formality of its Georgian facades to create a backdrop to the Council’s activities within the new extension. The cellular nature of the existing building it utilised for a range of meeting facilities for Council staff, public engagement space for Housing Options and customer service departments. On the third floor the internal finishes and double height volumes associated with the more ornate Arts and Crafts inspired operating theatre extensions have been revealed and reinstated providing a vibrant mix of working environments.
Montacute Yards, an innovative collaboration between AHMM and Ben Adams Architects, creates tailored workspace that balances contemporary working styles with a strong sense of community on Shoreditch High Street. A project of urban reconnection that turns a closed ‘back yard’ site into a permeable piece of the city, Montacute Yards explores different construction techniques, from its steel exoskeleton that draws inspiration from the warehouses of Shoreditch and gives depth and legibility of making to the façade, to its smaller CLT buildings to the north. These different techniques, and an emphasis on providing generous volumes, create spaces of different scale and character to ensure flexibility for future adaptation.
A focus on well-being runs through the project, from the creation of public spaces and access to roof terraces of different size, character and aspect, to opening windows, planting and the use of natural materials within.
