A Room for London

Last November, Living Architecture and Artangel, two of Britain's leading cultural organizations, held a contest open internationally to design a room in the roof of one of London's most prominent buildings for a visitor from the future Olympic Games in 2012. "A Room for London" will sit on top of the Queen Elizabeth Hall roof at the Southbank Centre in London and will allow up to two guests at a time a chance to spend a unique night in an exemplary work of art and architecture overlooking the British capital.

The competition was attended by 500 international teams. London-based architects António Miguel Gonçalves and Antoine Pascal formed a team with Lisbon architect Anthony Thevenon and have shared their competition entry with us. The quality of their project has been recognized by the selection board but didn’t make part of the finalists.

Project Description:

We are proposing a room that grabs the corner of the south bank centre. Our idea was to create a body in the roof, acting like a living organism finding different views of the city. In this way its articulated body adapts to the building’s shape. We would like to make people wondering what is that shape on the roof.

Dialog with the building

The room is expected to change location, but it will always keep the memories of its first address. The project was designed to play with the surrounding brutalist architecture, as the National Theatre, a building that is a clever way of building a nuclear power station in the middle of London without anyone objecting. This premise can be applied to the room, seems to be there without any permission. The design is based on sharp angles and its repetition, which could be clearly identified as the brutal architecture tools.

Position

We located the project on the edge of the building, because we need to be as much as possible on north, to see Big Ben (on the left, almost hidden by the Royal Festival Hall), and Saint Paul’s Cathedral (on the right side almost hidden by the National Theatre) and to be seen by the people as a new landmark, so the closer we install the structure to the out line of the roof more people will see it. We want to find more points of view related to the London’s landmarks at the same time to create a new spot in the city’s landmark.

This position also avoids a cantilever solution that would be too complex and expensive to construct in this kind of light material. The room is grabbing the North West corner, and from the Waterloo Bridge we will see the room entrance. The deeper the guest is going in the quieter the area around is. In this way the room is protected from noise pollution, more than any wide expensive insulation system.

Back and Front

There is a permanent dialog between the building, the surroundings and the city. The dialog with the surroundings is achieved by using the same brutalist language. With the city we achieved this dialog playing with the dichotomy of back and front facades of the standard terraced houses that we can find in London. In these houses the front with its cornice hides the pitched roofs (back facade), two architectures systems which ignore each other. This is expressed in the transversal section.

The project is playing with this representation, the section prevails to define its identity, and the end terrace is a specific response (entrance patio and chimney in the room).

Orientation

The project is assuming an orientation. The north is the front, with the views on the Thames, the room is dripping over the building, the south is closed from view and we use chimneys to get light in.

Sustainability

In order to do sustainable project we need to think in the all life cycle of the building.

This project is really specific because it is temporary and can be moved for different locations, so adaptation and easy assembly are two essential things.

During the design process we thought in easy ways of assemble and disassemble.

The building is composed by two bodies that follow the same section connected by an articulation that allow an easy adaption to different situations, so we use all the time the same skeleton. The bodies are made of a simple steal structure where we attach the different chimneys that go up and down. The ones that go up capture the sun and make it slide in side providing light and heat, the ones that go down focus on the different views that you can have from the top of Queen Elizabeth Hall but just two of them make part of the inside space and needed to be insulated.

This simple structure and this two articulated bodies gave us the inside configuration. We placed the entire fixed program in the two static bodies (bed room, toilets and living room) to allowed the rest of the space to be flexible for the two patios.

In terms of construction materials we want to use pre-fabricated and standardized materials which can be easily assembled and recycled. With this kind of materials we want to avoid waste as much as we can and other pollutants that normally we produced in the construction site.

See more diagrams and plans in the image gallery below: