98–100 De Beauvoir Road

98–100 forms part of a range of early twentieth-century industrial buildings immediately west of De Beauvoir Square, and its listed Neo-Jacobean houses, in De Beauvoir Town, an area of London planned after the Grand Union Canal and Kingsland Basin were cut in the 1820s.

These daylit, and naturally ventilated buildings have been planned to be let floor-by-floor, building by building, or (as it has transpired) as a campus for a single occupant.

Each building has a new staircase, lift, and WC core. This low-carbon retrofit scheme retains much of the fabric and embodied energy in the brickwork, timber, cast iron, and in-situ concrete frame.

Until recently the buildings’ calm brick façades concealed a morass of spaces, the result of more than a century of accretions and alterations.

Our scheme reshapes space and rewires circulation both inside and out to create a small campus of studio workspaces.

Each building has a new staircase. The one in 98 is concrete and ‘constructed’ within a new brick and timber structure.

Behind the staircase, the studios are linked by a top-lit 3-story volume and, at each level, a cantilevered concrete gallery, with, overhead, a balloon frame of timber, enclosing these spaces.

Into these, steel staircases are suspended. Each convex or concave opening is trimmed by a steel beam on the tangent to the curve.

A loggia in the larger courtyard, along with doors (replacing windows) and a second stair allows for the floors to be subdivided and occupants to work outside. Finally, a new story has been added to both buildings.

To the rear, the existing in-situ concrete structure and steel trusses were preserved and refurbished, and glazing was optimized for daylight and thermal performance.

Inside, the enfilade of spaces around the court are characterized by their expressed timber structure and, outside, these repeating volumes are wrapped in black EPDM rubber.