KR3N.
VOLUME 1: Growing Between The Cracks
THE HOXTON MULE
Sam Jacob
The project takes a dilapidated existing pub and adjacent left-over land to create a new building with a unique character in London’s East End. It provides a new home for Ivy Street Family Centre on the ground floor, allowing them to continue their work within the local community on ground floor and basement, with a residential unit above. The language and form of the building fuses elements from its local circumstance with more exotic references (from to create a striking building that knits back together its wider urban context.
The Hoxton Mule is a building whose form is shaped by the city around it. The site is an island that is the last remaining piece of what was once a terraced street, long since demolished by either bombing or planners. It is flanked to one side by 10 story 1950‘s housing blocks, to the other by a Victorian School, and backs onto low rise 1980s housing, The traditional street pattern erased over time, and at some point a U-shaped finger was drawn onto the site by a planner, introducing a gesture alien to the historical grain of the city and is far grander than the original building ever was. The design’s starting point draws from the particular accidents and contradictions that make up the site and its context.
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The U-shape becomes the building’s main design motif, repeated across scales from the city to the domestic. First as a brick wall that traces the perimeter of the site. The wall, echoing the blankness of the neighbouring wall to the school has exaggerated steps as it sweeps round. A tiny round window only exaggerates its size and blankness. On the southern side, the wall is far more animated, becoming a colonnade for the Family Center, with an entrance cut through the brickwork and a terrace.
The U shape is repeated again on the upper stories, this time setback to allow for overlooking and to allow an external stair to wind around to a 1st floor entrance between the two curves. Once inside, the U-shape is flipped 90 degrees then inverted to form the circulation up to the roof where a scaled down U-shaped timber structure sits on the roof terrace. The house’s main room is formed within the site’s U-shape. The ‘U’ reappears at more intimate scales too. Inverted as part of the graphic gates and as the handles for kitchen cupboards. A tower acts as a vertical end to the existing pub facade, an exaggerated and ghostly echo of the old terrace. Topped with what looks like a water tower, a circular look out window and a beak-like concrete protrusion for a plant pot, it act an like an urban character, nicknamed locally as ‘the dog’.
The design language is intended to be simple and raw yet also rich and subtle. It absorbs local references (the ad hoc back of terraces, buildings as freestanding objects like the neighbouring Victorian school and 50’s housing blocks) as well as resonating with a range of other references from Joseph Gandy via Studio 54 to Melnikov, Toyo Ito, John Hejduk and more. These are resolved in strong, expressive urban gestures, creating a new urban object marking the gateway to Hoxton Street market.
The project draws its form from diverse local references mixed with more exotic pieces of architectural culture. It fuses these to make a form that is striking and generous to the world around it. In this way it is super-local, reflecting its place as a community centre amongst those who use it, but also ambitious in elevating the everyday into a project that is unlike everything around it.
It is a project formed out of relationships. Between the two joint venture clients, between the community and its needs, between architecture and the city, between the vernacular and the disciplinary. In this way, the social ambition of the project is expressed in the architectural form. It is a building that is accepting and diverse in both how it looks and what it does. And through the marriage of the two has become a new local landmark, giving identity and presence to an otherwise fragmented urban situation.
The site has been in community use since the 1960’s, but the existing building was in a perilous state. Exterior walls were, for example, bowed and propped up with timber supports. The project has redeveloped the site, retaining the existing structure where possible. Care was taken with the existing structure to minimise demolition resulting in a part new / part old hybrid. The design rationalised the existing building and adjacent parcels of land into a coherent urban form that maximised internal space.
The split in functions has allowed ISFC to remain within the community they work with in an expanded and improved facility, enabled by the value created in the residential unit above. The design process has been as much about creating the legal and economic frameworks to enable the project as it has in physical structure of the building.
The project demonstrates a different way of going about things. More socially sustainable, supporting more local and specific ideas of value than is typically the case. The key to the process has been partnership, where both parties contribute and pool forms of expertise and value that is greater than the sum of its parts. It has been an unusual partnership, which in turn has created an unusual building. Collectively we hope the building will contribute to its context through the activities it can host and through contribution to the urban environment.
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Why should architects consider the surface finish of a building, now more than ever?
There are a few ways to answer this. First, there’s an idea where ‘depth’ is equated to meaning, while ‘surface’ is seen as shallow. This is clearly a metaphorical fallacy that isn’t helped by aphorisms such as ‘truth to materials’ . Meaning and value can be located anywhere. The surface of a painting, for example, is the site of all its significance. Secondly, the surface is the point of contact with the world - visually, texturally, environmentally. It is a kind of interface with ideas of value and meaning, but also with issues of time and use. So you could say issues around surface are simultaneously cultural, social and environmental. Is this new, well, definitely not, but at the same time as wider concerns about say, cultural identity, accessibility, care and maintenance, or sustainability change, so too do our expectations - and the possibilities - of the surface. Here’s a historical example. William Morris is perhaps most known for the patterns his company developed (some by him, others by his daughter May, and other collaborators). These were often produced as wallpapers to decorate interiors with flowing, all encompassing visual fields of flowers, plants and nature. On the other hand, Morris was also a committed socialist,. He described his idea of a post revolutionary world in his novel ‘News From Nowhere’, a kind of agrarian fantasy where citizens made thor own clothes, the Houses of Parliament turned into a manure store (still the most important buying in the city, but for completely different reasons) and childrens were sent into a forest that had grown in the place of Kensington Gardens instead of schools to learn. Perhaps his wallpaper - thin, printed strips of paper, applied to the drawing rooms of polite Victorian society - were actually a form of political manifesto, visually manifesting the world that his politics sought. Here, the surface is not just an aesthetic experience, but also a manifesto, a glimpse perhaps of the world as it could be.
In three words what advice would you give to help enrich someone’s experience of the built environment?
As an architect: Things are Ideas (and vice versa)
As a citizen: Use things differently (because occupation is a form of design)
(and always remember, the world around us is a designed thing, and that means we could also design it in other ways)
KR3N