Project description
The LLDC carved out this site from the Wickside Masterplan and encouraged our client O’Shea to hold a design competition. We won in 2021 with a scheme distinctly different from its neighbours. We took the outline consent and reconfigured it so that all forty apartments at Bridge House are dual aspect.
The building was delivered for the same cost per square metre as the other blocks on the masterplan, one of the last large masterplans to be developed in Hackney Wick. Every apartment has a view of the canal and the new square and exceeds the London Housing Design Guide on area. The tenure is split 65% affordable and 35% market with a shared rooftop garden which is open to every household.
The balconies sit within the frame, sheltered from wind and from overlooking, and sized so a table and chairs fit with the door still open. 87.5% face south or south-west and take the afternoon sun. There are no internal corridors: half the apartments are reached from a covered external deck to the rear and half directly from a lift core. No run of deck passes more than one other front door, and the lobbies take daylight through glazed doors. The deck looks east over Hackney Wick and the Olympic Park.
The in-situ frame forms most of the external jacket, with cladding reduced to a few areas of the facade. The concrete is poured in-situ with slab edges and soffits left exposed, batched 500m from site at a plant on the A12. The base is ten bays that rise with the bridge approach level, and the upper grid reads the building as three united blocks. Studioshaw is a Hackney practice and this building feels like it belongs in Hackney Wick. The frame is the architecture, and it sets the building apart from the New London Vernacular of brown and grey boxes that surround it.
A colonnade runs on two sides at ground level, facing the towpath and the new square. A café occupies a double height space straddling the level change between bridge approach and towpath, with other class E spaces alongside. In the colonnade there is a child-height window with an off-centre lintel, looking down into the café.
“What a pleasure and a joy to see this exemplary scheme delivering the highest of quality in Hackney Wick. 100% true dual aspect, innovative and climate responsive design maintained from competition to completion.” Paul Taylor, Design Principal, London Legacy Development Corporation.
“In working with Studioshaw they have shown great enthusiasm and ideas and this has really helped to push the building development to a successful conclusion. If asked were they the right architect for the project the answer would be a resounding yes.” CJ O’Shea.
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