Barrett’s Grove / GROUPWORK
Address
London, UK
Program
Residential
Status
Complete
Calendar
2014 - 2016
Text description provided by the architects.
Barrett’s Grove is a Victorian street of terraced houses, the potential monotony of which has been broken down by its builders with a variety of decorative arts and crafts treatments to door and window surrounds. At an urban level, later buildings such the rubble walled church, detached purpose-built apartment blocks and the tall red gabled LCC school interrupt the uniformity of height and roofline.
Our new addition sits amongst these later standalone structures, on a narrow site stacking 6 flats (2 x 3bed, 1 x 1bed and 3 x 2bed) whose form adds to the punctuation of taller gable ends. The red brick double stacked open stretcher bond is a self-supporting façade intermittently tied back to the CLT superstructure, allowing differential movement. Its colour echoes that of the school and Victorian apartment building, adding some unity in the streetscape, the perforations demonstrate the façade is only that, a ventilated self-supporting rainscreen not load bearing. Further empathized by allowing the ‘skin’ to wrap across the roof, while the double stack aims to lend some sense of mass, assurance of solidity if not defensiveness. Given the slenderness of the building its window and door openings were left uniformly large but, on a grid, to maintain a strength of form. Wicker is woven through oversized steel balconies to begin the introduction of softer domestic tactile elements, that are carried through from the front gate locks to internal cabinetry, window-seats and door handles.
CLT is used for super structural walls, floors and roofs with external insulation, waterproofing and a vapour barrier before the brick skin. The application of a clear intumescent varnish allows the superstructure to remain exposed as the internal finish, with a floor build-up for heating, services and acoustic barrier with rubber bathroom tanking the only additional internal layers. When measured using global standard EN15978 the integration of structure and finishes with a covenant on the land to reuse the CLT, the overall embodied carbon is negative and because of fewer materials, trades on and time on site 22% lower in construction cost too. Proving a new narrative that, if carbon sequestration in the form of timber structures and finishes were to be deployed, construction could turn from a 40% contributor of atmospheric carbon to a carbon capture industry.
