Office: GROUPWORK | ArchDaily

15 Clerkenwell Close / GROUPWORK + Amin Taha Architects

Cristobal Rojas — Wed, 21 Mar 2018 02:00:00 +0000

The brief began with a requirement for a loose fit building able to accommodate apartments and offices/studios across column free floors. Enough time was available to investigate context and a number of possible solutions for a replacement building that would sit within the all but vanished boundaries of an C11th limestone Norman abbey. One able to integrate, extract and perhaps make new a broader and better sense of context than that now dominated by late C20th pastiche.

Caroline Place / Amin Taha Architects + GROUPWORK

Rayen Sagredo — Mon, 24 Jul 2017 03:00:00 +0000

Surrounded on three sides by eight and nine storey mansion blocks shielding it from the heavy traffic on Bayswater Road and tourism on Queensway, Caroline Place is a quiet enclave of late 1950’s terraces north of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. Built with a Modern Northern European sensibility of sharp brick lines and crisp mortar joints layered with softer timber detailing, their interior layouts remained firmly rooted in an earlier English Edwardian tradition. Retaining a desirous separation of served and servant areas of maids’ rooms, sculleries, coal houses with a working rear yard. Servnats occupying the ground level with owners set out above, across larger light filled rooms. In the immediate post war period Bayswater had however already begun to lose its luster to that class, so much so that within a decade of being built its new younger inhabitants found these social conventions to be out of step with their aspirations. Undertaking iconoclastic remodeling and clearing out of the interior sub-dividing walls and where possible the exterior, replacing these with what was felt appropriate at the time. Four decades on, the new occupiers, a family of five, retain the aspiration for open plan living with a desire for tactile material finishes and inevitably to different tastes.

Barretts Grove / GROUPWORK

Valentina Villa — Thu, 29 Sep 2016 09:00:00 +0000

Barretts Grove is an archetypal Victorian street of two storey brick terraced houses later interrupted by detached apartment buildings, a tall red gabled LCC school and rubble walled church. The new addition sits amongst these later stand alone structures.