Mid-Town, Mid-Rise, Mid-Door
Located on a live site in Hackney Wick - London, a former industrial site, which in recent years has fallen in economic decay, and currently ongoing urban transformation, the project proposal provides 90 dwellings for social housing. The project reinvents the housing unit typology to provide a “work from home” space located as central part of the dwelling, establishes a benchmark for sustainable social housing by utilizing CLT as the primordial tectonic material and innovates on energy efficiency by integrating semi-enclosed thermal buffers during the winter and letting cool airflow into the space during the summer.
The design is conceived from the unit scale, where the diagonal enfilade creates the dominant form for spatial arrangement. The project investigates the relationship between interconnected spaces through the lens of the studio’s prompt: Midtown, Mid Rise, and Mid-door.
Mid Door:
The mid-door is a constant element implemented in every unit, taking the form of a loggia. While having direct access to the dining room, living room, and bedroom, the mid-door takes a dual character of autonomous and dependent space by being integrated into the unit as another space or as a semi-open terrace which allows the user to operate the panels. The interior spills out to the mid-door while maintaining a domestic quality and allowing cross-ventilation to the entire unit.
Mid Town:
The Diagonal enfilade acts as the heart of the unit with interconnected spaces. Within these rooms the workspace becomes an important element for the new lifestyle of the user and its visual relationship within the common rooms. Like most spaces, the workspace can be accessed from two entryways, one from the bedroom and the other from the dining room. The flexibility of interconnected spaces is not only applied within a unit, but also through a unit-to-unit relationship of interconnected spaces.
Mid Rise:
The Mid Rise resembles its tectonic qualities at full force when viewing the building’s facade. The project strives to lower its carbon footprint by utilizing CLT as the main structural element composed of crossed-pillars following a 3 meter grid, which allows the unit to reduce the amount of walls, and provides more flexible spaces within the unit and between units. The CLT crossed-Pillars allows the diagonal enfilade to become the datum of the unit’s spatial organization, by framing room-to-room relationship with defining corners.
This structural organization also integrates passages that connect to the diagonal enfilade at the unit scale. Meanwhile at both ends of the unit there are shear walls. The crossed-pillars in the design act as structural elements and also as “room definers” to create a sequence of room-to-room relationships.
Master plan:
From the comprehensive master plan of hackney Wick, three objectives were revised:
- Courtyard Typology
Lot E +F is consolidated to propose workspaces and retail to all frontages. This typology mimics neighboring buildings with similar massing styles.
- Our Proposal as a Key Place
The proposed massing has varied townscapes, one of them being a high-rise building placed on an axis to the pedestrian street leading to the canal. The tower-pedestrian street alignment emphasizes the identity of the project as it is being framed looking from the canal, at the same time, it becomes a meet-up point and a memorable place for the visitor.
- Linkages:
Since the project is located in a former industrial setting, it is essential to be sensitive to the immediate adjacencies of the site. The building has multiple passages at ground level, creating linkages between essential points, such as the hackney Weick metro stop, to Heritage locations and Wallis Road.
Finally, the building uses a material palette sensitive to the context such as the CLT and glazing, as opposed to the industrial context that uses a more aggressive material palette. Its material softness and porosity are seen everywhere in the project, on the facade, in the unit, and on the ground floor.
This project is associated with romanticizing the procession between rooms and framing these spaces with the use of the CLT as the main framework, meanwhile, being empathetic to nature as it tries to integrate itself into it. Only through these moments, the mid-door is used as an instrument to give the user an intimate relationship with the garden. Lastly, the workspace demands rethinking of the typical unit-plan as a central element of the dwelling.
