Designed for a joint venture client comprising BioRegional and Quintain, our brief was to deliver a highly sustainable, landmark housing project exceeding Eco Homes ‘Excellent’.

Known as ‘Community In A Cube’, the 82 unit scheme develops its narrative from the brief and aspirations of the client to provide a mix of unit types and occupiers within a volume prescribed by the existing masterplan.

The necessity of slicing up and excavating this volume creates courtyards, shared amenities, garden space and helped derive the character of the building where different housing typologies are juxtaposed.
Flats are well planned with 2.7m floor to ceiling heights, large windows giving light and taking advantage of views over the water. They are accessed by a single core and a circulation strategy that achieves 82% net to gross.

The building addresses its surrounding public space though specific characterful elements that help form streetscape, while the higher levels of the building address the city. Meanwhile its interior court develops its own character.

Materially, the building uses a pallet of tougher brick to its exterior, responding to the industrial landscape of the old docks. Its interior court is lined with a softer, warmer timber to which decorative motifs and planting are used to add to its character. Planting is irrigated by recycled rainwater.

Circulation links the shared garden space with the public square though planted terracing, encouraging a strong yet defined link between public, semi public and private space. The ground floor integrates commercial units, a community centre and a pub.

This house in the north Essex countryside is the latest to be commissioned by Alain de Botton's Living Architecture company.

It has been designed in collaboration with the artist Grayson Perry and contains a number of specially commissioned artworks. The programme is for a two-bedroom guest house that also contains a gallery and formal reception space.

The site is on the Stour estuary, a few miles inland from Harwich. It lies within an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and the house will enjoy spectacular views across the river.

The exterior will be clad in bottle-green ceramic tiles designed by Grayson Perry. The roof will be finished in brass sheet and feature a number of elaborate figurative sculptures, also designed by Perry. The sculptures, tiles and interior artworks explore the historical and contemporary character of Essex.

The design received planning approval in November this year and work is due to start on site in March 2013.

Interviewed about our collaboration with Grayson Perry, Alain de Botton said: "I think the work of both is being taken to new heights by what they bring each other".

You can read more about the interview and project here

FAT presents The Museum of Copying at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale

Invited by David Chipperfield, director of the 13th International Architecture Biennale, FAT has contributed an exhibition to the Arsenale titled The Museum of Copying. Responding to the curator's theme of Common Ground, the Museum of Copying explores the idea of the copy in architecture as an important, positive and often surreal phenomenon.

The Villa Rotunda Redux

The museum centres around FAT's own installation, The Villa Rotunda Redux, a 5m high re-make of Palladio's Villa Rotunda that explores the Villa as both a subject and object of architectural copying. The facsimile is made using contemporary fabrication techniques, CNCing a giant mould from which a spray-foam cast is taken. Cast and mould are arranged as two quarters of the Villa displaying the process of fabrication as well as opposing qualities of positive and negative, and interior and exterior.

Sam Jacob, a director of FAT said "There is a history of copies of the Villa Rotunda that have been important staging posts for architectural culture. We hope to extend this history and explore how copying something is, strangely, a way of inventing new forms of architecture. It also seems sweet to return a bastardised form of the Villa to its original home in the Venito."

Download a Villa Rotunda Redux mini-book

Book of Copies

The Museum of Copying also includes a contribution by San Rocco titled The Book of Copies comprising a library of volumes prepared by invited architects each of whom have assembled photocopies relating to a thematic building typology. Visitors to the Biennale can assemble their own version of the Book of Copies by photocopying these photocopies into a unique Book of Copies. The 60 contributors include Andrea Branzi, Jan de Vylder, Ryue Nishizawa, Paul Robbrecht, Francois Roche, Denise Scot Brown and Jonathan Sergison.

Architectural Doppelgängers

Architectural Doppelgängers, investigates examples of architectural copies, fakes and replicas. Strange stories that surround Architectural Doppelgängers are told through examples that include a facsimile of the Villa Rotunda in the Palestinian Territories and a fake Austrian village in China.

Repeat Yourself

Ines Weizman's "Repeat Yourself": Loos, Law and the Culture of the Copy researches the significance of copyright on architecture, using legal disputes around the ownership of Loos' archive and work as a test case.

With many thanks for their generous support:

Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Architectural Association, Marchday, Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown

Press Coverage:

LA Times

FT

Dezeen

The bus shelters on Old Mill Street, Manchester, deploy distinctive patterning and colouration to mark the stops as distinctive and individual destinations. As part of Old Mill Streets shared space, the both address issues of accessibility while contributing to the distinctive street scape.

Lasercut steel panels sandwich coloured glass, green to one side of the street, pink to the other. As light falls though these panels it generates atmospheric effects of colour an pattern, transforming the everyday activity of waiting for a bus into a richer experience.

The shelters were designed after winning a competition run by Urban Splash in collaboration with GMPTE, Manchesters transport authority.

The Heerlijkheid Bridge acts as a gateway, a connection and a sign. It forms the entrance to the new Heerlijkheid park, and providing both a welcoming gesture while integrating security. Built from a steel structure, clad in wood the bridge spells out 'Hoogvliet Heerlijkheid' in supergraphic cut outs - a giant sized, walk-through sign.

Soft Hercules is a stool cast from foam rubber - the soft squishy stuff that is usually used to make stress balls. The bust of Hercules, usually something solid both in its material and the culture it represents becomes unexpectedly soft, deforming a recognizable object into stranger shapes when it is sat on. It uses the plasticity of rubber to suggest a more uncertain and doubtful state.

The project involves the refurbishment and extension of an existing Edwardian Library in Croydon, South London. FAT were originally commissioned by Croydon Council to undertake a feasibility study of the library looking at how it could be modernised to achieve contemporary access requirements. The ground floor of the building included several difficult changes in level while the lower floor and rear garden remained inaccessible. In addition the building fabric was in poor condition and the original interior detailing lost under a number of additions and modifications.

FAT's redesign results in a completely new entrance sequence and 50% more usable floor area. The lower ground floor has been completely opened up to form a children's library and community meetings rooms which also provide access to the rear garden. At the front of the library a striking new reading room and entrance pavilion has been placed to one side of the original entrance. This new structure resolves the various access issues in a generously proportioned new entrance sequence and also provides an elegant new reading space inside.

The building fabric has been refurbished and upgraded both internally and externally. Original features have been retained within a new, spacious interior that emphasises the fine proportions of the original building. New bespoke shelves and furniture - also designed by FAT - provide subtle reading niches and seating alcoves and are on castors to allow flexible arrangements and future expansion.

The pavilion is constructed from pale white pre-cast concrete with a highly polished surface which harmonises with the stone detailing of the original building. At the top of the pavilion is a metre high three dimensional 'frieze', a literal sign that proudly announces the building's civic function.

FAT have redesigned Selfridges new contemporary womenswear department in the landmark Oxford Street store.

The floor is organised around three main areas. The first is Europe's longest denim wall. Here a canopy, formed by a seemingly chaotic explosion of timber struts frames the space. Both raw and expressive, the canopy plays against a background of sharp graphic legibility formed by the denim shelves. Visual languages of direct pragmatism and more glamorous theatricality are combined to explore the dialogues of workwear and luxury that run through contemporary denim design.

Selfridges' Basics area plays on the idea of ordinariness made strangely special. A series of overscaled coat hangers become a surreal means of display (so that normal sized hangers hang from their giant cousins). Crates and boxes become pop-graphic plinths through the use of dyed wood laminates and planks of formica.

The contemporary area is a space that introduces new and experimental designers. It is defined by an orange poured resin spill and a chromed frame outline of a house creating a flexible, customisable space that works like a shop-within-a-shop, allowing brands and designers to take ownership of the space.

Around these anchor points mats for brands including Vivienne Westwood, Alexander Wang and Zadig and Voltaire respond to FATs design guidelines. Giant billboards apparently lean against the perimeter wall, providing a consistent horizon to the space.

The space is characterised throughout by painted floor patterns recalling abstracted and overscaled industrial markings. Tables and plinths develop a consistent language linking the varied areas.

This building, commissioned by a local developer to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the founding of the city of Amersfoort, sits on an important site adjacent to the Koppel poort (an ancient gateway) in the medieval walls of the old city and fronts onto the River Eem.

FAT were required to create an extraordinary architectural object which would relate to both the old city and to the mostly 19th Century warehouses along the riverfront. The exterior of the building is constructed using pre-cast concrete panels. It address both the infrastructural view and from passing trains on the eastern flank of the building through its graphic and colour while the intricate detail of the facade also addresses the riverside.

Internally, the building is a restaurant and has a grand ceremonial quality created by the theatrically designed staircases and the complex inter-relationship between the central atrium and the balconies/viewing points which overlook it