Making space

Here East is The Bartlett’s first significant footprint outside its traditional stomping ground in Bloomsbury. We speak to its architects. Words: Dominic Lutyens

“It wasn’t always like this,” says Hawkins\Brown Partner Euan Macdonald. “It was dull before it was transformed, inactive, utilitarian, sterile.” He is talking about the original state of The Bartlett’s new home at Here East – a gargantuan building that was formerly the BroadcastMedia Centre for the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Though it might have been abuzz with TV journalists then, the building had little architectural merit. Its interior was vast and soulless and, post-Games, it was scheduled for demolition. That was until Here East, a company owned by clients of real-estate investors Delancey, decided to transform the site (which also includes the Games’ former Press Centre and a new auditorium) into ‘London’s Home for Making’.

The Bartlett and UCL’s Engineering Sciences Faculty are in good company, coexisting with: established corporations, including BT Sport; innovation hub Plexal; the studio of choreographer and director Wayne McGregor; Loughborough University London; and startups. This is deliberately symbiotic, says Macdonald. “The idea was to create an ecosystem whereby small businesses benefit from the knowledge and mentorship of blue-chip companies, which in turn gain from the freshness, enthusiasm and youthfulness of smaller concerns.”

Hawkins\Brown has been behind the entire site’s transformation, but the opening of UCL’s Here East space is the latest chapter in a five-year collaboration between the practice and the university. According to Macdonald: “The main challenge was to make this 100m-long, 40m-wide, 10m-high temporary structure habitable, comfortable and safe.”

The practice has done just that: giving this cavernous, hangar-like interior a more human scale by adding new floor levels, including mezzanines. There were other practical reasons for this, too – a need to capitalise on the space, since the building’s footprint couldn’t be enlarged. “Another constraint was the lack of daylight, and one of our tasks was to maximise it,” says Macdonald.

The building was originally divided into two spaces by a wall, behind which there was no daylight. Hawkins\Brown has removed the partition, allowing light to permeate the building’s huge glazed façade and, beyond this, to a series of interconnected 5m-high studios and workshops and a multi-purpose, 330-seat auditorium that accommodates several open but acoustically self-contained teaching spaces.  

“We worked closely with academics from both The Bartlett and UCL Engineering to understand their teaching methods, along with specialist acoustic engineers at BuroHappold, to develop a design that could allow lectures, crits, seminars and social activities to run concurrently,” says Macdonald.  

Beneath the auditorium are laboratories. The area behind it, towards the back of the building, incorporates several artificially lit, 10m-high fabrication spaces. “The building is split into two sections,” he explains. “The front part is more human-focused, the rear area more machine-focused.” Linking the two areas is a corridor or ‘runway’, which is wide enough to drive a forklift truck down.

Above all, Here East reflects an exciting paradigm shift in architecture education that will promote deeper cross-pollination between disciplines. It’s no accident then that the building’s design is commensurately fluid, flexible and interconnected – in contrast to 22 Gordon Street’s layout, which is designed specifically for the School of Architecture’s pedagogy.

Here East will also offer innovative Master’s courses in Engineering and Architectural Design, Situated Practice, Design for Manufacture, Design for Performance and Interaction [see p.98], as well as Robotics and Computation.  “In architecture and design, there’s immense collaboration with technical and pragmatic disciplines like engineering,” says Noonan.

“To engage more with this is exciting. It opens up new directions of teaching and learning. When the two disciplines collaborate, architects can learn from engineering about the limits of materiality and structures, while engineers can learn about problem-solving in a more subjective way.”

“The building’s design was developed through an intensive dialogue with the client, stakeholders and project team in order to establish the project’s key goals and its complex technical requirements,” continues Noonan. “At Here East, factory-like spaces equipped with large robots, CNC-routers and waterjet-cutters were required, all of which don’t fit naturally at 22 Gordon Street.”

The demand for these spaces reflects another trend in architecture and engineering for off-site manufacturing and prefabrication of components by robots, which is safer, quicker, cheaper and more ecological, since less waste is generated on site. In view of this need for heavy-duty fabrication equipment, the depth of part of the building’s concrete floor had to be increased from 180mm to 600mm.

The building also houses prototyping facilities.  A flexible and future-proofed layout is another key characteristic of Here East. “We needed to create spaces that could adapt to change. Many of the courses are new and will likely evolve over time, the technologies used are emerging and the student population is set to grow,”explains Macdonald. It helps that most of the furniture isn’t fixed and that partitions are kept to a minimum.

Noonan and Macdonald were also keen to create a playful interior with pop-art touches that enliven the space: the auditorium’s tiered seats are covered in sunshine yellow rubber – a far cry from conventional, institutional auditorium seating.  

Asked if their design has any architectural precedents, the two cite Cedric Price’s 1961 Fun Palace, conceived as a theatre for Stratford in association with director Joan Littlewood, but never built. It’s not altogether surprising that they mention this, given that Price’s design was flexible, interactive and embraced emerging technologies, including cybernetics and IT.  

But the Here East site as a whole references contemporary London too, says Noonan: “To generate the Here East masterplan, we were inspired by the neighbouring area of Hackney Wick, whose tight-knit light-industrial factories and yards are home to one of the highest concentrations of artists anywhere in Europe.” It is often creative enterprises that pioneer new places: where they go, others will follow. 

Images: Richard Stonehouse