Hi, Valeria, how are you? 

 

Hi. I'm great. How are you?

 

I'm very good, thank you. I wanted to ask you about The Acre, the building you've just completed, which is a reworking of a 1980s Seifert office building in Covent Garden. Could you briefly describe the key moves that you made on that project?

 

Yes, the key moves, where it all started, were when the client asked us to rethink how we bring back life into The Acre, a building that had somehow expired in the heart of Covent Garden. It had expired for a couple of reasons, because it was built to be a bank, so it was very introverted, inward, looking very solid. It had a lot of obstacles to access it, and its major problem was the floorplates had a little bit more work to do than what they were actually doing. So, we inserted two large infills into the building. We rethought the corner, and we kept the majority of the structure, about 80% of the structure. We enclosed the centre of the building, which was an open atrium, and we enclosed it with a transparent cover, with the purpose of actually giving it a heart. All of this created really healthy floorplates that had really good circulation, without any pinch points. We unlocked terraces on the majority of the floors, from level to up; different terraces in different orientations. We changed all the windows of the existing facade, and we brought the building back to performing like a new building. And all of that with having the occupier in mind. So: how do you bring all the good things that office tenants are looking for to attract talent? And that is a building that stands for joyfulness and being healthy, contact with nature, really good views, but more than anything, also being connected with its context. So, we opened its doors to Covent Garden, and we removed all the obstacles which were really physical – deep modes and changes of levels – and we made everything accessible, inclusive, transparent, welcoming and open. That means that the heart of the building is now accessed for the public – not only for the community of the building, but for the whole of Covent Garden; tourists, passers-by, etc

 

And obviously, Covent Garden is a very buzzy place, so you want to make the most of that, don't you?

 

Exactly. And that was one of the things, actually – the building is very contrasting to Covent Garden, being a Brutalist building with its very strong presence and its mass; very contradicting to the urban fabric and the grain of Covent Garden, which is smaller, tighter. It's got more inside-outside connection, connection to the public realm, etc. This building was a bit of a fortress. So, one of the biggest obstacles was how you bring activation to a building that is, you know, so gridded and so present, and made of concrete, with a lot of deep facades.

 

Not hugely far away is Space House, which is Seaforth Land's recent work; also a Seifert building. So, I'm just wondering if you think Brutalism is having a bit of a moment in London?

 

Yes, and that's one of the beautiful things about creating those connections, because you can actually see the Space House from one of the terraces, and obviously, from the inside as well. So, it's a really lovely connection. And, you know, I'm actually fascinated with Brutalist architecture, and one of the reasons is because I understand concrete. Brutalism comes from the word 'brute', which, in French, means concrete. It sounds a little bit scarier than what it actually is. It is actually just from raw materials. And that craft, for me, is fascinating. Nowadays we can't really create and work with so much concrete and with such heavy materials because of embodied carbon. It's very heavy on embodied carbon. So, with existing buildings that were made at that time in the context of Brutalist Architecture, you actually have that canvas; you have that concrete, you have that craft, which is something that, for example, in The Acre, we were fascinated, because you get to create so much expression with a canvas that you already have. And I do think that London has so many iconic Brutalist buildings that have been rethought, that have been prepared to have a new life, and that we don't have now the opportunity to build buildings like that. We now have to build buildings to be able to disassemble them and to have, you know, this regenerative take on how they operate and how they create, how we give them a new life. As opposed to a Brutalist building, that because of the way it was crafted and presented, its life is longer, its permanence is longer.

 

Your views on how we build retrofit are broadly similar, as I understand it, to how you think about new buildings. Would you like to explain your principle there? 

 

Yes, and I actually call that approach 'the new-new build'. So, my take on how we should be building new buildings is considering that we should learn from retrofit. All the processes that we do, all the investigations, all the surveys that we do to an existing building to understand how it can be used as a material bank, to then grab the materials, and, for example, from floor to wall or from facade to cladding an internal material, or just reusing all the elements that we have done in so many of our buildings. Can we actually use that approach for a new building? So, let's say you start with an empty site – instead of starting from scratch, why don't we go around and see what are the materials that are available in other buildings that are coming down or in storage, and use them? Not only will that be an incredible positive step towards reducing carbon, but it also might get us as creatives, more as a positive step towards innovation when we're looking at the availability of the materials. So, it also makes us be more creative, and it gives us a new palette of materials to play with.

 

Fascinating! Final question, because we're just up to time: I wondered whether you had a view on how the office design market generally is at the moment and broadly architecture 'market' for you guys. How would you characterise it currently?

 

Well, I tend to think that it all changed when the pandemic started. When the pandemic started, we were so busy as a studio because we were doing everything that we were doing before, but in terms of building transformation, office buildings - "keep going! Let's power through this". When the big question about return to office came about, that's when a lot of the developers perhaps took a pause and really started to rethink, what is the new way of working? This is where we've done a lot of research in terms of, how do people like to work? What are their priorities? The new generations? And I think what's happening is actually fascinating. I feel like the market is still a little bit on a pause in terms of, “let's understand what do we want to do”. There's a lot of feasibility studies going on, but we do know from numbers that have been put out there that there will be a shortage of offices very, very soon. So for me, with a very positive outlook on things, I think it's going to come to a place where there's going to be incredible schemes coming out, because of all the studies that everybody has been looking at very, very soon, and also because perhaps after there's a little bit of going in and retracting and studying, there will be a boom of innovation and a boom of competitiveness. Because everybody knows that the way retrofit has been moving the agenda of construction that is a very big learning curve. So, I'm actually excited at what's going to happen in the next few months and years.

 

Fantastic. Well, that's a very optimistic note to end on. Thank you very much for your time and your views, Valeria,

 

No, thank you. It's a pleasure.

 

Great. Thank you so much.