by It has to be the ironing board with the best view in the capital. On the top floor of the new London College of Fashion, in a prime corner of the kind usually reserved for a boardroom, students are busy pressing their garments in front of a rolling panorama of the Olympic Park and the towers of the City beyond. Behind the vertiginous ironing station, past the stair steps of sewing machines, a great void descends through the building, cutting down floors of pattern cutters and jewellers, cobblers and prosthetic sculptors, as dizzying staircases crisscross over and over. over, connecting this multi-storied world. .
“A mill building for the 21st century,” is how its architects, Allies & Morrison, describe the new £216m home for LCF, a 16-storey fashion factory standing on the banks of the River Waterworks in Stratford, across from London. Stadium. It is a fitting place for such production rubbish. Before the steamer of Olympic regeneration arrived here, these riverbanks were home to belt makers and sheepskin tailors, rag traders and wig suppliers, housed in a range of sheds alongside car breaking yards and aggregate crushers.
The students are very visually stimulating – we didn’t want our architecture to compete
“We wanted to celebrate the area’s history as a place of industry,” says architect Bob Allies, explaining how his team drew inspiration from the Yardley soap factory, a 1905 brick mill building that once stood on nearby Carpenters Road. “College isn’t just about glamorous people in flowy dresses. It is one of the few places where there is real craftsmanship.”
Glamor is not the first thing that comes to mind when you first see the building from the park. As the largest block in the East Bank’s cultural quarter, the folded origami shell of the V&A East and the boxy forms of the BBC music studios and Sadler’s Wells East – due to open next year – are six towers. It looks a bit like a dour office block compared to the V&A’s sharp features, apparently inspired by Balenciaga’s dress. There are no such sane references to the LCF. “It has to be tough,” Allies says.
The impression of a corporate headquarters softens as you approach and notice details such as the smooth scalloped concrete cladding recalling needle ribbons, and the zigzag sawtooth roof line, a factory-esque symbol – as in the RCA’s new home in Battersea – that this is a sign. done place. A heroic 15 meter high colonnade of large concrete columns marches along the front, lifting the building up to preserve views of the V&A, while a steep cascade of tiered seating spills down to the towpath, creating an inviting place to sit on sunny days. . In the summer, the college plans to stage its spectacular shows below the colonnade – shows that would help bring some of the South Bank’s passion to the beautified banks of this river. Still, there’s always something disconcerting about the way this series of venues is linked together, like a cut-and-stop car, with a plethora of wind-reducing screens bolted between some of the buildings in a clumsy afterthought.
Step inside the LCF and you forget most of these qualms. Large spirals of concrete spiral down from the floor above, curling into a tight corkscrew as it plunges underground, and dipping up into oval arcs that bend overhead like the curl of an orange peel, making it one of London’s most dramatic new lobbies.
“We had a lot of Borromini on our desk when we designed the staircase,” says project architect Bruno Marcelino, referring to the Italian Baroque master whose sublime interior swelled with gravitational force. Here, the architects have created a kind of brutal Baroque, with the structural elements stripped back to celebrate their tectonic height. The curves are also a product of structural necessity: the tense arches of the ceiling beams, for example, are the result of the post-tensioning of internal steel bars. It’s a multi-layered, theatrical space that you can imagine students using for their shows, outrageous costumes cascading down this three-dimensional path. And probably not just at show time.
“The students are very visually motivated,” says Marcelino. “So we didn’t want our architecture to compete too much.” A simple palette of exposed concrete, black steel and blonde maple runs throughout the building, providing a neutral backdrop for the colorful inhabitants. The architects refrained from applying too many fashion motifs: a textile pattern to be thrown into the concrete columns did not appear in an earlier design. But there are subtle nods, such as perforated window shutters with a straw pattern, and a grille that recalls the geometric facade of LCF’s former campus off Oxford Street.
Founded in 1906, as a union of three trade schools, the college was spread over six sites across the city, none of which were purpose-built. “It’s fantastic to have all the departments together for the first time,” says head of college, Professor Andrew Teverson. “We’re excited to see what synergies emerge. Our previous homes were all hidden, but here we have a real public face.”
Unusually, the lower floors of the building are completely open to the public to enter. You can use the cafe, visit an exhibition in the waterfront gallery (currently showing graduate work), and even walk up the spiral staircase to check out whatever workshops there might be. be held in the “maker’s square”. The vitrines displaying student work line a public thoroughfare at the base of the building, connecting a (future) bus stop to the river, and feeling like a porous part of this emerging city, rather than a gated campus.
Upstairs, the open-plan teaching rooms and work areas occupy the “heart” space of a staircase, with large internal windows allowing trainee visualisers, grinders and compositing artists to learn their trades. The rooms form long enfilades of studios and workshops, which can be connected and adapted as teaching needs arise, and are full of thoughtful details. Noting how students at LCF’s Shepherd’s Bush campus used the windows as work areas, the architects designed the studio’s windows with deep, tapered openings and window seats that double as work benches. Some floors open onto outdoor terraces, where stairs allow you to walk between outdoor floors on the upper levels, adding to the feeling of a social courtyard campus turned on its side – a rare quality to achieve in a 16-storey tower.
Students seem delighted, commenting on how the open spaces are “refreshing and fun to work in”, while another says the sense of department mixing feels “very special your co-workers”. Waiting for the elevators is a pain, he adds, despite the fact that there are eight of them. Even more reason to take the so-called “Harry Potter stairs”, and enjoy the vertical promenade past body casting and cosmetics testing, hairdressing and fabric dyeing.
Fashion is the second most polluting industry in the world, after fossil fuels, and all the exposed concrete here makes you wonder about the carbon footprint of the building itself (despite achieving BREEAM Outstanding, the highest sustainability rating). The architects argue that wood would not be possible on this scale, and that additional carbon was saved by leaving the surfaces exposed, avoiding the usual plasterboard linings. Allies says that if they were designing the project now, they would explore alternatives to the concrete cladding. Longevity, as ever, is given as the main justification. “We’ve been around for 117 years,” says Teverson, “and we want to be here for at least another 117.” As Marcelino says, the building is “a permanent book case, where you can keep changing the books”.
Just as Central Saint Martins art college was incorporated into the citadel of private real estate Kings Cross, as a catalyst for instant cool, bringing this buzzing fashion factory here was a smart move, and it’s expected to shake some subversive lives into the a possible life. felt like an overly sanitized area. It’s good for college, too. Teverson says they are already charting a new course for conservation using their state-of-the-art archive space in conjunction with the upcoming V&A East Storehouse across the park, where the museum’s collection will be housed in an open access archive.
With the new University College London block to the south and the base of Loughborough University to the west, the somewhat disjointed vision for “Olympicopolis”, 12 years on from the Games, is starting to take shape. It will be seen in the next few years, as four towers of mostly private flats go up at the end of the East Bank’s £628m cultural platform to help pay for the whole. That is the Faustian pact of Olympic regeneration.
