Small Office Building SW1
This small office building was our first commission from Land Securities. It was won in an invited competition in 2006, and was designed over the winter and the following Spring. The building was to replace a 1990s office block on the corner of Vauxhall Bridge Road and Victoria Street, that was to be demolished if London Underground intended to widen the streets there. In fact, this didn't happen, and the project was never submitted for planning. However, it led to more commissions at Victoria.
Our design for this building was the beginning of our investigations into passive solar architecture that sits within a historic context. In this instance, the office block is the first building within Westminster Cathedral Conservation Area, and as such acts as a sort of 'lynch gate' and threshold to it, mediating between the mansion blocks of Vauxhall Bridge Road and the civic facades of the train station and the Victoria Palace Theatre. The scale, massing and materials informs some of our later projects at Nova.
Nova East is directly to North of this site, and it also sits above deep sewers that flow beneath this liitle office block, sharing the problem of limited positions for structural supports. So, the theme of a cantilevered and stepped ceiling plane is common to both projects.
