Henley Halebrown has transformed a series of early 20th century industrial buildings into contemporary workspace as part of an ongoing relationship with The Benyon Estate in east London. Adam Khan applauds a project that navigates a path between slavish conservation and the pitting of old against new.

Words
Adam Kahn
Photos
Nick Kane

Adam Gopnik in his book, The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery, asks what it means to master a skill and explores how to do it by learning a diverse range of new skills from boxing to driving. The ‘real work’ comes from stage magicians who describe ‘the accumulated craft, savvy and technical mastery that makes a great magic trick great.’ Gopnik notes this is beyond mere technical proficiency but includes a supple gauge of the audience, a playing with their expectations.

The buildings comprise a long low block of mid-19th and 20th century industrial space in De Beauvoir Town, a conservation area in Hackney, east London.

Today, architects often feel that their skills are ever less appreciated, their authority and trust diminished, their scope curtailed, evident in the inexorable rise of design and build, and the mushrooming of project management consultancies. Setting aside for one moment the profession’s own sorry role in that demise, what do we understand by mastery in an architect? The workspaces at De Beauvoir Road are a good example of what a skilled architect can bring, and in a humble way outline a sense of mastery.

Workspace at no 100. The retrofit retains much of the existing fabric and embodied energy. Like the original 100-yearold structure, everything new is pared back and robust so it can endure with little maintenance.

The buildings are a long low block of early 20th century workspace set amongst the charming streets and squares of De Beauvoir in east London. Owned, as much of the area, by The Benyon Estate, the brief was for flexible workspace. A first phase was designed in 2011 and delivered in 2017 in the kind of tiered model comprising co-working café, incubator spaces, and small and large units, which has now become common. Quickly taken up, the client noted that ‘attention to detail has proved a huge selling point.’

Workspace at the rear of no 98. The existing insitu concrete structure and steel trusses were preserved and refurbished, while the glazing has been optimised for daylighting and thermal performance.

The recently completed north end of the block benefits from that trusting client relationship, allowing the architect to be bold and pursue a development of their already sophisticated language and approach. These days, traditional procurement is typically ruled out in the name of risk and cost management, and with refurbishment the risk and potential gains are magnified. This project demonstrates the gains from the more supple approach that traditional procurement can bring to the difficulties and opportunities that refurbishment presents when approached with skill and care across the team. This is a good fit with the architect’s agenda of ‘craft-based low-tech building techniques that could indicate how elementary the construction of an office might be.’ That in turn is part of a wider strategy of low-carbon retrofit and low-maintenance robustness.

Section though the larger of the two courtyards showing 98 and 100 De Beauvoir Road

This starts with a bold strategy of clearing up the accreted clutter of internal spaces; cutting away to make a new entrance courtyard and a new little building as circulation core. This makes a satisfying sequence of connected spaces, from the public realm forecourt through a porte cochère, to a pink floored courtyard and through to a larger courtyard backing onto the residential gardens.

Sensitive decisions on where to keep, trim or demolish bring a coherence – a linked set of courtyards and a spatial matrix of internal and external rooms – which imparts an additive organic feel to the place. This is strengthened by a subtle material strategy of both unity and diversity. On the one hand, sills and lintels are unified across new and old, and brick is used to stitch the whole – repairs and additions – together.

Meanwhile, a nice variety of brick choice does something very rare. Bricks are not chosen as exact heritage matches, but neither to declare the new; rather to produce a family of affect – an equivalent level of rawness and tonal range. The fletton bricks enclosing an external stair bring their unselfconscious quality; the kind of bricks that have traditionally been the cheap expedient choice for the unseen areas of a building. That familiarity and rawness is the connective glue amongst the ensemble of brickwork, where patchwork and repair are cherished for their richness. This is more the feeling of exploring Belgian Begijnhof – a far richer, time-layered ambiguous experience than given by the typical UK approaches to heritage, which are usually trapped between a slavish correctness ending up all the more bland and inauthentic, and a tired didactic pitting of new versus old.

Looking up through the staircase to 100 De Beauvoir Road. Each joist, floorboard and nogging is visible, as is the negative space of each tread. Every surface is a pale hue emphasising the chiaroscuro effect of skylight permeating down through the section.

The circulation strategy at De Beauvoir is calculated to give full flexibility of letting options – a small campus. And yet that strategic overall nous eschews any attempt to apply a flat consistency of architecture, exemplified by the two circulation cores. The south courtyard core is a study in compression and density. Each stair flight is an arched precast unit, simply stacked on each other. This has a delightful directness and innocence, at once like children’s building blocks but also evidently practical to build, and as if a transformation was happening in front of your eyes from standard to joyful.

Left: Planometric of the staircase to 98 De Beauvoir Road.    Right: Isometric plan showing the core to 98 De Beauvoir Road.

Further up, the core steps back from the party wall allowing in daylight but affirming its status as a mini building. Cantilevered concrete jack arches, like a miniature St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross, reinforce this sensation of gravitational density; the core anchoring the looser, floppier warehouse spaces assembled around it. By contrast, the north core is riot of subtraction, a highly direct application of Gordon Matta Clark’s Anarchitecture. The timber floors, joists and boards are retained and boldly cut away in large arcs. New steels rake across to prop up the joists. It’s so rare to see construction this direct – like the delightful expediencies of a building site and without fetishisation. The arc cut-outs flip in plan, making what is a simple practical construction into a rich baroque. The new roof structure adds its own finer-scaled element of expressed timber construction, bringing in sunlight and shadow, which add another layer of complexity and animation, while also orienting and stretching the space vertically.

At the upper levels, the core steps back from the party wall allowing daylight into the building.

It is satisfying to ponder the simple geometric operation that delivers such a rich experience. And now the building has a single tenant, users have the opportunity to savour the dialectic opposition of the two cores and their opposing tectonics – arcing in plan versus section, additive versus subtractive, concrete versus timber, stereotomy versus filigree.

The typical delivery of workspace separates a clean generic shell from a branded fit-out. Here, the architect takes a more thorough integrated design approach, working the challenges and opportunities of renovation. Across the piece, the addition of new structure or fabric is ruthlessly expedient yet seized upon to add depth and layering. New steels for the rooftop extension sit above the retained, piggy backing on the old or spanning independently across. Eschewing the impulse to tidy up or hide away, a subtle palette of colour tones, distinguishing new from old, bring enough control and the spatial character that comes from tectonic depth and layering. And so, while a layer of fit-out has arrived with its own sensibility, it doesn’t need to do so much work with the base build delivering so much character.

A set of external stairs and walkways line the courtyard and poke into the view from the entrance courtyard. In a small adjustment the upper deck projects a little further. This gives a dynamic presentation to the courtyard and makes a crow’s nest high up to enjoy the long views. The lower flight is encased in brickwork giving a stronger room definition to the courtyard, and the soffit is arched, suggesting and inviting inhabitation – turning a mere access stair into a sheltered place for a smoke and chat. These moves are not functionally necessary, but neither are they expensive or whimsical. They are subtle crafted adjustments that affect the sensation of the space out of all proportion to their cost. Close detail exemplifies this position of crafted economy. To reconcile the coursing of the brickwork with the riser dimension of the stair, clay tiles are laid flat as packers to suit. It is as expedient as it is elegant and manifests a sense of hand-made care and attention.

Rooftop accommodation at 100 De Beauvoir Road. Timber-vaulted modules wrapped in black EPDM rubber frame a narrow sheltered courtyard, which is open to the south for sun and views of the City skyline. Multiple doors from the courtyard allow for subdivision into smaller units.

The rooftop additions reprise and develop the strategy from phase one – a series of timber-vaulted rooms clad in black rubber making a nice skyline to the long low block. But whereas the first phase was composed 98-100 De Beauvoir Road loosely as a settlement pattern, in the new phase the modules are gathered more formally, framing a long sheltered courtyard, open to the south for sun and views of the City skyline.

The court is on axis with the local church spire, increasing the formality and strength of the space. And while still underpinned by flexibility with copious doors from the courtyard allowing subdivision to smaller units, this greater severity feels appropriate and is perhaps reflective of the development of the practice overs the years to ever more bold and confident handling of space. It is perhaps no surprise then that the tenant has responded by making this floor into a shared library and chillout space; the scale and intent of the architecture inviting a larger piece of social infrastructure.

Of course, this all makes excellent climate and business sense; well thought through adaptability, expedient use of found structure, economical deployment of new material. By trusting a skilled architect to react and respond in detail all the way through the build process, a smart client has got themselves extremely good value in every sense of the word. Clients and project management consultancies come and see!

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