This established business providing affordable creative studios asked us to have a look at using entrance spaces for something more social: somewhere to meet rather than just pass through, available to rent out-of-hours for exhibition, performance, pop-up dining or party.
Three things are immediately obvious; material, place and community.
The studios are all in old industrial buildings so they have a strong physical presence and are very much knitted into local community. Part of the brief is to build on this with new social spaces open to the public – fostering links and making good business sense. While these will have common elements they will also have modular parts easily adapted to individual sites and those using them.
For example, in some units there is scope for a full café or bar, with plenty of footfall and local interest, elsewhere space constraints mean something else will work better like a coffee cart or food truck in the courtyard.
Existing buildings share a uniform palette of robust and ordinary finish appropriate for high-traffic use and making them instantly identifiable; makes sense therefore to tap into this and develop a new sub-collection of materials to complement the existing, and give the new areas their own feel.
Lots of possibilities in the mix to be married up with the practicalities of operation, fabrication, cost and a really interesting set of commercial and social questions facing this enterprise post-brexit/post-lockdowns. On-going.
