When Use Architects’ Jo Hagan came to develop his own site, he used an innovative material to make sure the block was a welcome addition to his Hackney home. Michael Willoughby reports.
How to handle a large residential-commercial building in a sensitive area is a question that exercises many architects lucky to have received such a commission. But as the co-developer on the East London site, Jo Hagan, owner of USE Architects, had a greater opportunity than most to create the building he wanted.
Located on Mentmore Terrace, in one of Hackney’s characteristic streets of railway arches, the five-storey mixed-use residential and commercial property faces a combination of long-standing light-industrial units, retro junk stores and more than a couple of trendy cafes.
“I wanted to create somewhere that reflects the aspirations of this gentrifying area,” Hagan tells me in his ramshackle studio immediately next-door to his creation. “If properly handled, this could be a great place to live.”
He has been living in Hackney for 15 years and was already familiar with the site, having prepared a client’s plan for a commercial property on the ground-floor and three residential units on the upper floors back in 2004.
However, the scheme was kiboshed by the 2008 crash and so he bought the site with neighbour, Caz Hildebrand, of Here Design, in 2013. Together they expanded the project to encompass seven upper-floor residential properties.
In creating his own project, the architect was determined to create a building that made a positive statement about a locale in transition and yet embraced by the past.
“This is an industrial area, built predominantly of brick,” he says.
“The buildings around here reflect the technology of the time. I also wanted to use the latest technology, but not to completely reject the past.”
So it was that Hagan came to design the first British building faced entirely in Corian, DuPont’s composite material comprised of acrylic polymer and a material found in bauxite ore.
The material was £400/sq.m, making it twice as expensive as brick but priced comparably with the cheapest curtain-walling option. It’s also cheaper from a whole-life perspective due to its low maintenance and longevity.
It’s most usually found in high-end kitchen and bathroom worktops but here the white surface – with a hint of grey – was used to create a facade hovering somewhere between the natural and the man-made.
For, while Corian is synthetic, Hagan holds that it behaves more like a material such as brick or wood.
“If you look at it when the sun hits it, it has an ethereal quality, becoming quite luminescent,” he says.
“When it’s dark, it’s quite solid and somber. So you perceive it in a different way according to the elements.”
This playful translucence and reactivity shrouds a building which is quite sparse and formal – a tall, thin cuboid with concrete, Corian-clad balconies featuring glass balustrades.
Hagen says:
“The building has no articulation, no figurative qualities,” (hastening to add that he has nothing against decoration as such.)
Instead, to break down the mass of the building, Hagan and Hildebrand devised a proportional system to create the tessellation of the facades. They chose the proportions 4:5:1 as a reference to Ray Bradbury’s book Fahrenheit 451 – that temperature being at which books spontaneously combust.
Panels were those dimensions or a combination of those dimensions, creating a sense of harmony, lightness and delicacy in time-honoured architectural fashion.
“We relied on the proportional system to break down the pattern as a counterbalance to the ‘monolithic’ nature of the building,” says Hagan.
The balconies serve a similar purpose:
“We wanted to strike a balance between their mass and the way they were detailed – seemingly floating because of the lightweight quality of the Corian. The shadow-gap detailing around them makes them look like they are not connected to the building.”
But he had another trick up his sleeve in creating a facade outstanding in its sleekness: windows that were flush with the skin of the building. These are held in the same plane as the cladding with a 250ml gap between the met-sec and the facing. This was achieved by using a steel-framing system attached to the edge of the slab.
Windows are the (now-discontinued) Helo by Velfac, featuring an unusual one-piece frame construction. These help support U-values as low as 1.
“The design is both an abstract aesthetic and yet practical in that it offers more variety to the vertical elements and makes a stronger pattern with the shadow gaps, while also having the appearance of a solid mass from afar.”
“As well as creating a look commensurate with the clear, geometric outline of Mentmore Terrace, the device was an anti-Ruskinian commentary on the skin-like nature of modern buildings,” says Hagan.
The idea was also to give the building presence.
“Some of the skin is solid, some of it is transparent,” he says,
“but the whole thing is essentially a decorative device. But, if you put in window reveals, it would look like a completely different building.”
The building is constructed of an in-situ reinforced concrete frame with load-bearing floors and, therefore, no beams. Wall-panels are of Metsec and the rain-screed are installed on the Hilti aluminium frame using a Kiel fixing system.
DuPont also supplied a Tyvek UV Facade – a type of advanced breather membrane for greater design freedom, protection and enhanced energy performance for open-jointed facades.
The interior of the building makes reference to the solid, industrial past of the area since the soffit of the concrete slab is left exposed along with the brick of the party wall. The rest of the interior walls are either concrete or brick.
“The normal arrangement for such a property,” says Hagan,
“would be for the outside to be rough and brick-like but the interior to be soft, painted and decorative.”
“Really, it should have been steel if we had wanted it to be quick and cheap but the concrete is essential for the weight. We wanted a balance between the brutal and delicate.”
Meanwhile, the different elevations of the building are fairly simply dictated by keeping the building more open to the elements on the south side and by having fewer openings on the north side in order to reduce heat-loss.
And despite its apparent exterior simplicity, Mentmore Terrace is kitted out with not just roof-mounted PVs supplying 20 per cent of the renewable electricity, but also a green roof.
Further power is saved by the installation of a whole-unit heat-recovery system to prevent people from opening the windows. The grills have been routed out directly into the external panels to assist this process – the circles of which this author confused with a decorative element.
Spanish facade engineers, Urbana Exteriores, were crucial to the construction process, since no English contractors had experience with the cladding system.
“Because they were in Spain, it was a bit of struggle, but they knew where the problems were likely to lie in order to avoid pitfalls and to create a completely flush building.”
This was both crucial and a challenge, since there were none of the normal elements such as cornicing to cover up the joints. As a result, everything had to be completely exact.
So, despite the fact the team used laser-sighting to make sure every one of the joints was in the same plane, the course wasn’t a smooth one.
In fact, the windows went in first and weren’t straight and so had to be sent back for recompletion.
“Even though we used laser sighting, we really had trouble,” says Hagan.
“Every one of the joints had to be in the exact-same plane so it looks completely flat. Could it have been created without CAD? Yes, but it would have been far more laborious.”
Meanwhile, Hagan has nothing but good things to say about contractor, Albion Homes.
“They were great to work with. Even though it wasn’t something they were familiar with, they really engaged and were enthusiastic about doing something different.”
Hagan was right about the popularity of the area. Every one of the apartments in the development was sold off-plan long before the building was completed. Since completion of the terraced building, a number of extra units have appeared, including one-bedders to the north of the development zone and 10 more units elsewhere.
He is aware and perfectly happy that it is not a loud or startling building, given its immediate context.
“After all,” he says, “another benefit of the translucent skin is to create a building that is able to blend in with its surroundings even though it is fundamentally different.”
“Instead,” he adds,
“its qualities are appreciated after observation rather than immediately.” Yet he says his desire to create something that started regeneration the right way seems to have paid off based on the reaction of passers-by. “Since I live next door, I watch them walk up and down,” he says. “They always stop and look at it. They think it’s lovely.”