Make Re-Make

For this design exercise I was asked to propose an alternative facade for the Falstaff House council building, with a view to increase its representational value on the street and transform its architectural character. Architectural elements were identified to negotiate the relationship between the room and the city in the existing buildings and transform them into fresh architectural proposals. The architecture was underpinned by compositional and conceptual thinking and explores ideas of repetition and variation, figuration and measure, decorum and articulation, threshold and depth, all of which required an interpretation of the city. In looking around the local area, most of the construction is either post-war architecture or classic Victorian terraced housing. The typologies of the post-war try to take elements of the Victorian housing to enhance their facades and tie into the local context. One of the most visible and typological ways they do this is through the use of bays and balconies to provide rhythm, communal spaces and improved light. This idea was applied in the initial concept sketches to try to reinvigorate the facade by addressing the strong horizontality of the building and to provide it with an important vertical presence that would also allow for greater useable amenity space to the building’s residents. The design process engaged aspects of the existing buildings lack of verticality, understated entrance and minimal communal space. Through iterative redesign, the resulting option of staggered bays and rearranged flat entrances creates semi-private spaces acting like individual front gardens for each flat. The ground floor was redesigned to provide amenity programs available to the residents and to ground the repetitive form of the facade. Here the arrangement is inverted to provide solidity. At roof level the various iterations result in a simple perforated balustrade allowing the facade to fade out into the sky.