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Emberton House, Olympia: From cars to culture
Trevor Morriss, principal at SPPARC discusses how the practice embraced the challenge to convert a historic multi-storey car park at London’s Olympia in the Streamline Moderne style into a hotel and school, as part of the site’s cultural redevelopment.
“A
djoining the main Olympia building there is gradually taking shape the huge new garage which will solve the car parking problem of future visitors,” reads a newspaper cutting from February 1937. As this would suggest, the world- famous London exhibition centre’s Victorian architects could not have predicted just how far the rise of the automobile would change not only how visitors accessed the ‘People’s Palace,’ but town planning at large, for the next hundred years. With around two million cars on the road by the end of the 1930s, the thousands that attended the buzzing exhibition centre every year needed somewhere to park their Morris Eights and Ford Model Ys. Located to the Olympia site’s north on Maclise Road, the fi ve- storey car park was one of Europe’s largest garages at the time of its 1937 opening, increasing the venue’s car parking capacity by 1,200.
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We replaced the internal structure with a new reinforced concrete frame and post- tensioned slabs connected to the facade
It was also one of the fi rst car parks to use a double ramp system; staggered fl oors connected by curved ramps at each side elevation provided two separate routes out for traffi c. This meant over 1000 cars could leave the exhibition centre in less than 20 minutes. Aside from its practicality, this addition also gave the multi- storey car park (MSCP) its distinctive look. It was one in a series of projects that marked a step change for Staffordshire-born architect Joseph Emberton, perhaps best known for the Simpson’s
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