A London apartment tower with echoes of Victorian rail and Ancient Rome
Despite its somewhat artisanal look, the construction methods used are contemporary
[LONDON] Across large parts of London, architects and developers face a common conundrum. On one hand, they need to create contemporary, state-of-the art buildings that maximise a site’s potential. On the other, they also need to be acutely sensitive to historic cityscapes, or either risk being denied planning permission or face accusations of ruining the city.
Cadence, a new apartment complex in London’s Kings Cross designed by Alison Brooks Architects, manages to tread the line between these two needs with elegance and invention.
A large but by no means overbearing complex built on a former goods yards directly behind a Victorian railway terminus, Cadence harmonises with the older architecture in its vicinity, without descending into pomposity or historicist cosplay.
The inspiration for Cadence’s red-brick arches will be clear to anyone who knows the area – they recall the extravagant neo-Gothic railway terminus of St Pancras Station, on whose former goods yards it is built. Before it was revamped and expanded to make space for trains to continental Europe in 2007, the station’s splendid colonnaded railway viaducts extended across Cadence’s current site; their demolition is a source of regret for many Londoners.
Touring the building with Bloomberg CityLab, Alison Brooks confirmed that the uncanny echoes of these viaducts are intentional.
“As an architect, to enable those moments where you look at something contemporary, but it reminds you of something very powerful and memorable from the past that we can identify with – it’s honouring that memory, enjoying it, and being optimistic and creative with historic elements,” Brooks said.
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While the building clearly echoes the nearby Victorian station (albeit with elongated Bezier arches rather than the station’s pointed neo-Gothic ones), the bricks themselves draw inspiration from a different memory: Brooks’s time as an architecture student in Rome.
Thin to the point of being tile-shaped, they resemble the ancient bricks still seen across the Roman Empire’s former imperial capital. Those structures were built in ways that echo 21st-century construction techniques.
“The Romans invented concrete,” Brooks said. “And in Roman construction, brick was used as a permanent formwork for concrete backing.”
In other words, Roman brickwork was both a facing for a building’s façade and a form of external mould into which concrete could be poured. That’s a technique not a world away from today’s use of brick as a veneer covering a concrete core.
While the inspirations are cosmopolitan, Brooks noted that the materials used are a distinctively British blend rarely found across the Atlantic. “We work with brick primarily, or stone and pre-cast,” she said. “These kinds of quality permanent materials are quite rare to see in housing design in North America, where it’s considered very expensive and apparently there are no bricklayers left.”
Despite the somewhat artisanal look of this bespoke brick, the construction methods used to put it in place are contemporary. To slash emissions and make up for limited space on-site, the facade panels were substantially prefabricated off-site.
“Off-site fabrication is the future of construction, because I think it’s our only way to achieve anything close to zero waste,” said Brooks. “A lot of the emissions in construction comes from materials thrown away during the building process. Prefabrication addresses that by producing all the elements of the building in a climate-controlled, safe environment. Here we worked with a super-compact building site, so there wasn’t really anywhere to store material. Everything came on a truck and was lifted into place.”
On a tight, high-profile site like this, there is understandable pressure to deliver a large amount of sellable floor space. This is one possible reason – beyond the obvious sustainability benefits – why Cadence only provides parking space in its small garage for people with disabilities.
Elsewhere, however, the building avoids the monolithic effect that might come from trying to squeeze the absolute maximum of units from the site. It opts instead for a slightly saw-toothed silhouette where mini towers of varying heights, with ample gaps between partly occupied by roof terraces, are grouped around a palazzo-like inner courtyard.
Breaking up the building’s massing this way makes it look a little like a turreted fortress, although efforts to make the inner courtyard visible externally means that it resembles a fortress where someone accidentally forgot to pull up the drawbridge.
“It’s part of my philosophy as an architect that memory is fundamental to creativity,” Brooks said. “You can’t be creative if you have no memory, nothing to reference.”
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