Design District

Innovative creative district providing affordable studios and workspace in Greenwich Peninsula

Buildings C1 and D1 are two of sixteen new buildings, commissioned from eight emerging European design practices, within the masterplan for a new Design District, which sit at the heart of the Greenwich Peninsula. The buildings provide affordable workspaces and wider amenity for creative industries, as well as serving a vital placemaking role at the heart of the peninsula.

Architecture00 designed C1 and D1 to encourage collaboration between the SME tenant community. Concrete external covered decks provide access, creative thresholds, and social spaces for tenants as well as allowing the tenants to expand beyond their units to work on larger scale projects.

 

Images courtesy of Taran Wilkhu

 
 

BREEAM Excellent

An important part of the brief was achieving BREEAM Excellent, using natural ventilation and local MVHR units, as well as connecting to the district heating. 00 maximised passive systems such as high thermal performance and an airtight envelope. The proposal creates solar shading via the walkway decks and mesh to minimise solar gain, and exposes as much thermal mass as possible internally to reduce the thermal peaks. Fully openable windows enable maximum natural ventilation and night-time cooling as well as providing a smaller surface area of heat loss by primarily only insulating the net internal area. All these passive measures reduce the requirements for active systems, therefore reducing the whole-life carbon cost.

 
 
 
 
 

Building C1

£2261/m2 GEA

~1300m2 GEA

3 storeys + rooftop terrace

C1 is a gateway building to the Design District, as it is located near the main public space adjacent to the O2 centre as well as the anticipated high traffic proposed food hall area. The building addresses both these highly public activities by forming an inviting gateway to the food court’s external square via a large cantilevered concrete slab. A large publicly accessible staircase invites the public to ascend the building allowing the workshops, studios and office spaces to engage the public at each level. The top of this vertical landscape provides a basketball court set within a continuous stainless steel wire rope mesh enclosure. The robust, thick concrete slabs sandwich full height glazed curtain walling between them, forming the shopfronts to the units. The floorplates have been designed to be sub divisible, thereby allowing a variety of tenants.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Building D1

£1903/m2 GEA

~1800m2 GEA

5 storeys

D1 provides a community of adaptable studios, workshops and office spaces within a secure vertical landscape. Concrete external covered decks provide access, creative thresholds, and social spaces for tenants as well as allowing the tenants to expand beyond their units to work on larger scale projects. The continuous stainless steel wire rope mesh provides full balustrade edge protection to these decks whilst also retaining a very clear visual connection between the public and the workshops. The varying floor to ceiling heights in the building, combined with the varying footprint of each floor encourages variation in usage. The building consists of robust, thick hard-wearing concrete slabs with clear, full height glazed curtain walling sandwiched between them. Trees are located generously on the external decks. This robust and adaptable nature creates a communal and permissive environment to encourage creativity.

 
 
 
 
 
 

Thanks to Taran Wilkhu for use of imagery

 
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