Sarah Wigglesworth Architects design and complete canoeing facilities in London
Situated close to the World’s End Estate, and in one of the most deprived wards in the Borough, Cremorne Riverside Centre sits at the eastern edge of Cremorne Gardens, a public park on the north bank of the River Thames overlooking Battersea.
The new facility consists of two buildings: one to house the boat store and offices, the other to provide changing rooms. Both have identical lozenge-shaped plans but with roofs that pitch in opposite directions. They are clad in Cor-ten steel, a low maintenance and vandal-proof material, to resemble rusting boat hulls. The platform between them is made of steel grille-work which brings the public realm up to the level of the pontoon. It is accessed by a platform lift and a set of stairs. Here canoers can gather for a class and manoeuvre their boats before and after heading for the water. Before they are stored boats can drip dry over the new landscape of rocks and boulders that fills the former training pool below.
The two buildings are constructed out of timber on a steel base which holds them together for flood removal. The walls are insulated with sheep’s wool from Cumbria. Heating is provided through a ground source heat pump. No demolition material was removed from site as it was used to fill the training tank and to furnish the roofs of the buildings to help create a brown roof. This provides a habitat for spiders and other insects that birds, especially black redstarts, particularly like, and replicates the conditions of redundant urban sites.
The new buildings are sited closer to the river’s edge than is typically permitted and as a result the architects were required by the Environment Agency (EA) to make the buildings removable to allow repairs to be undertaken to the river wall in case of a flood. Accordingly the changing room building is demountable in three sections and the store/office is demountable in two parts. The EA also stipulated that the design team draw up a Method Statement covering the sequence of removal, crane hire, road closures, identification of a site on which to store the parts, design of a lifting structure, services disconnection procedures and so forth, in case of a flood.
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Belsize Architects' completion of the University College Boathouse in Oxford
The original 19th Century boathouse of University College Oxford
succumbed to arson in 1999. It took the college almost eight years before they organized an invited design competition to replace the former Grade II listed structure. Belsize Architects were one of four architectural
practices invited to submit a proposal to meet the college’s requirements
for a building which would provide rowing, social and residential
facilities.
For Belsize Architects, the new boathouse did not need to be as traditional
in appearance as its predecessor, but it still had to be able to support as
much tradition and pride as was invested in the original building. Our
proposal, having won the competition in June 2004, was completed in
October 2007 at a cost of £2,100,000.
Creatively, the design concept for the new Boathouse draw upon two main
principles, which are directly inspired by the sport of rowing:
Firstly, the boats, the oars, the water, all exhibited unique characteristics,
which were manifested in the copper roof. The goal was to achieve a sort of
blade cutting the sky, as the scull cut the river that first day we visited the
site. The roof, like the shell of that boat, stretches over the entire building to provide shelter over the rowers and spectators.
Strategic penetrations through it allow streams of light to filter into core areas. Keeping the roof as thin as possible and cantilevering it from the building gives uninhibited views to all sides, directing people's focus to the building's surroundings.
Secondly, we wanted the ground level of the building to carry a lot of
mass for storage & security reasons, in as much as to prevent the
occurrence of another arson attempt. Brick was an obvious choice of
material for both its resistance to tampering, as well as its use as the
predominate material of the previous building.
Steven Holl selected to design Princeton University Arts Buildings
Architect Steven Holl has been selected to design several new arts buildings for Princeton University’s Arts Complex to be located on the Western edge of the campus where there are located two nationally recognized community theatres. The firm will be responsible for designing buildings to house Princeton’s Theatre and Dance Program, components of the Department of Music and the Lewis Center for the Arts and the Society of Fellows in the Creative and Performing Arts. Encompassing an estimated 135,000 gross square feet, the preliminary plans call for a black box theatre, a large dance studio, an orchestral rehearsal studio, several smaller acting studios, dance studios, music practice rooms, classrooms support spaces, a café and offices.
Holl and other architects yet to be selected will replace Renzo Piano Building Workshop, the firm initially selected in April 2006 to design and master plan the entire arts and transit neighborhood at Princeton. Piano’s firm withdrew from the commission because it was concerned it no longer had time to commit to the project, given other commissions, said the University.
Participating with Holl on the project will be Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates of New York and BNIM Architects of Kansas City, which collaborated with Holl on the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. New York architects Beyer Blinder Belle will oversee the planning and design of the neighborhood.
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