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Architects: Amin Taha Architects
- Area: 186 m²
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Photographs:Tim Soar
Text description provided by the architects. The four storey building at 115 Golden Lane is a mid 19th Century building that has over the years changed use from purpose a built ‘warehouses’ accommodating small workshops, clerks offices and storage. To meet changing regulations and use requirements over its history multiple layers of plasterboard, partitions, suspended floors and ceilings gradually covered the original structural materials of brick, cast iron and timber. Further 20th Century building and fire regulations prescribed yet more smoke lobbies and partitions diminishing practical and usable area and the building’s inherent ‘open’ spatial character and material quality to the point that they had been forgotten.
Our client initially asked us to reconfigure and provide cohesion to these spaces with an approach that offered a consistent palette of materials and detailing throughout. Early and small opening up investigations rediscovered the original brickwork, cast iron columns and timber joists to be of good and sound condition. A strategy was agreed to remove all suspended ceilings, raised floors and any later wall linings to reveal these. Working together with an approved Building Control Inspector and a team Structural, Environmental and Fire Engineers new building technologies and engineered solutions were implemented to achieve compliance with building regulations, British and European Standards. Allowing us to entirely open up the original spaces and reveal the inherent architecture while providing our client with a substantial construction cost saving compared to conventional building methods and products.
Street level access is through two bronze portals with pivoting security screens and glazed doors and integrated post boxes and video entry systems. An abstracted ivy patterns was used to laser cut both the security screens and ventilation panels. The ground floor and basement was fitted out for an advertising company with a new waxed mild steel integrated stair and book case and a cantilevered bridge to a suspended glazed conference room. Bespoke oak and mild steel furniture provides desk space, storage utility furniture accommodating kitchens, wc’s and showers.
Externally the principle scope involved lightly refurbishing timber windows casements and stone and cast iron mullions and transoms, cleaning brickwork and resetting the slate tiles roofs and terracotta chimney pots.
