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PROJECT REPORT: RESIDENTIAL RETROFIT & REFURBISHMENT
The brief for Phase Two called for a lighter touch approach that would preserve as much of the original building as possible
INTERCONNECTED
The interconnected tenement blocks were initially positively received by residents
new vision for the estate would be embraced by the city.
The competition for Phase 2 of the
project, held in 2015, saw five shortlisted practices each assigned a flat in the derelict building and given two weeks to demonstrate their ideas. The brief called on the architects to “live and breathe” the site and “wholeheartedly commit” to it. Mikhail Riches’ team was inspired by the remnants of lives lived there, including traces of former inhabitation and the ways residents had made their flats feel more like home. For example, some had painted balcony walls different colours, and laid patterned linoleum on their doorsteps. Back in the 1950s, when designs for Park Hill were first published, the facade was heavily criticised in some quarters for failing to express individual dwellings within the block, regardless of whether apartments were large or small and who might live inside.
“Personalising their balconies was perhaps a way for people to look up at the building and say, that’s my flat, helping give a sense of individuality in the whole,” says Saleh.
Mikhail Riches’ competition-winning proposal sought to redress this failing, installing patterned ‘door mats’ at each entrance onto open-air access decks (known as the streets in the sky’), and coloured balcony reveals to give each flat its own identity. Otherwise, the building would be
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a faithful restoration, keeping as much of the existing fabric as possible and giving it a thermal and acoustic upgrade. The original Park Hill layout was complex, a bewildering configuration of 37 different flat types and no repeating cluster. Even the drawings were hard to interpret, with notes written in obscure jargon, forcing Mikhail Riches to retain the same team on the job to avoid misunderstandings.
Existing flat sizes and layouts were reconfigured to meet modern standards and ways of living. A ‘typical’ existing floor plan featured a series of single bay-wide flats – dubbed ‘sad flats’ by the architects – were too cramped. These were removed to ensure all apartments have at least a double-bay wide kitchen/ living space.
“When we tessellated that through the scheme, it enabled double bay wide living spaces on the deck access street side, or on the balcony side, which enabled many more flat typologies,” says Saleh.
Although some three-bed units remain at ‘hinge’ points in the U-shaped plan, most were converted to two-beds with an added ensuite; walls between stairs and landings were also removed to open things up.
Carbon counting
Sustainability was embedded into Hawkins\ Brown’s Phase One scheme, which retained and repaired the original 50 year old concrete frame. Phase Two took things a stage further, a key constraint being the
ADF SEPTEMBER 2024
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