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We were chosen by the V&A to do this project based on a competitive process where we were one of five architects asked to
produce designs based on an outline brief on the site of the Henry Cole Wing. It was always going to be a challenge
to fit the functions of an education centre into a building like this and I think that what stood out for the V&A was that
we were prepared to take quite a radical approach as to how we would alter this building to suit this new purpose.
The design brief incorporated a 140-seat auditorium, seminar rooms, artists' studios,
lunch rooms, design studios and all the ancillary spaces.
It was important to us that the building was a welcoming place, it had to be accessible to all from a physical point of view
but also from an emotional point of view: you had to feel comfortable here.
So we spent a lot of time looking at different types of spaces which people are used to creating in,
so artists' studios were a big inspiration for us.
We wanted it to feel like a space that you could occupy
in a casual and flexible way and that you'd be inspired to create work within it.
It was always interesting for this project that the site for it was the Henry Cole Wing.
The V&A was built on the foundation of education and
the building that we are in was originally designed as a Naval School of Architecture.
Over the course of 100 years it was used for lots of different uses
and most recently it ended up as a café and exhibition space for the V&A,
but in a way we are now returning the lower two floors of this building to its original purpose.
I think the main architectural intervention in the project is the double-height space with the staircase linking the two floors
but the other key design decision was putting the auditorium inside what used to be called the Brechman Room
and the auditorium exists as an independent free-standing structure which you can see,
if you imagine looking down on this space you'll see the auditorium existing as a box within the box,
and that allowed us to keep an appreciation of the original scale of the architecture of the room
but also to create a completely new facility.
The key challenge with this building is to try to turn quite a dark old Victorian space with lots of cellular rooms
into a bright modern environment that would be inspiring for people to come and learn in,
so the key challenge really was to bring natural light into the building and to open up the views between the different spaces.
Initially the first floor of this building was pretty much a lost world,
you just didn’t know it was there because you only had the staircase in the corner
so from an early stage we knew that we wanted to make a big hole in the first floor
to allow views upstairs and to allow natural light down into the basement.
We were doing quite a lot of serious work in the existing building and everything had to be carried in through the window
so we got some fairly big bits of steel in order to
hold up that auditorium and they needed to be brought in in sections and then assembled
and then lifted into space. All of the concrete had to be pumped from outside
into the building and generally we were working in confined spaces.
One of the key parts of the project is the staircase and we knew that for the staircase to do spatially what we needed it to do,
concrete was really the only material that made sense, but working with concrete comes with its own challenges
most particularly that you have to work with the concrete in a set amount of time, so once the form work is all built
you have to pour the concrete in a particularly ordered way and this presents many challenges for a builder
not least when they are working in a small space and there is a limited number of people
who can do something which is quite complicated.
The building is made of masonry construction which means that where you have structure,
you have quite large amounts of solid structure
so we had to introduce quite a lot of quite radical alterations in order to open up the building so
there is quite a lot of steel work hidden behind some of the new openings
which really transformed the way you can use the space:
allow you to move through it a lot more freely, but they did require a lot of work
and a lot of time was spent in the early stages of the project doing that quite major surgery on the existing building.
It was important that the design was accessible to as many people as possible
and this was a very real challenge in a building which was designed
when these concerns didn’t really exist in the same way as they do now,
so a lot of effort went into achieving wheelchair access
to all the different spaces on the upper floors, to the extent that we actually removed entire sections of flooring
and installed a ramped concrete floor to link the level we are on now to the residency studios and built new ramps
so that you can get access into the seminar rooms as well.
We have a concrete floor which is designed to be a flexible hard-wearing adaptable finish.
We were always very keen to use natural materials where we could, so
timber features quite strongly in the design to bring warmth into the interior.
The other key thing was always that we wanted there to be transparency so a lot of glass has been used throughout the Centre
and the challenge there was to create transparent walls that didn’t allow sound to pass through them
so we have very technical double-glazed glass walls with large air gaps.
It is interesting that the Centre appears like that there is quite a lot of colour, but if you analyse it,
almost all of the colour in the Centre is in free-standing objects.
It is mainly the furniture that brings the colour to the Sackler Centre
and this was deliberate because we knew that the infrastructure is going to be here for longer,
the colour is something that can change.
We thought that green was a good colour for an educating environment, it’s a colour which is seen a lot in nature
and I think it generally feels like a stimulating learning colour.
We are very happy with the end result
and the emotional reaction that people say that they get as they walk into this main space
is an uplifting feeling and I think that is the most you can really hope to achieve with a project like this.