The architects and engineers behind the One Crown Place project gathered online last week to discuss its merits and the secrets behind creating a ‘good citizen-, very busy urban block’.

That description was offered by John Bushell of Kohn Pedersen Fox, the architects that designed the mixed use project in Hackney/City borders, and was chiefly to do with the way the hotel, retail, offices and high end residential combined elements of old (a retained Georgian terrace) and new, and included active frontages.

Laura Picardi of the practice presented some of the technical challenges of the project alongside its sustainable credentials such as the scheme’s own energy centre. The project includes fabric reuse to reduce embodied carbon, a new public and shared open space, operable windows and optimised use of roofs for terraces and amenities, while 100 per cent of the energy used during construction was procured from renewable sources and some residential elements were fabricated off-site.

KPF’s Charles Olsen, moreover, described the practice’s extensive use of glazed terracotta, as well as how it commissioned an artist/colourist who drew inspiration for some screen printed glass panels from Hackney craft and Constable paintings. ‘We took our cues from the local buildings in the area around us and again wanted to utilize a fired earth project’, said Olsen.

But perhaps the most striking element of the project are the 15 steel trusses used as a load transfer system, which support and are exposed in some of the apartments in the two residential towers of 30 and 34 storeys. ‘We would get a lot more efficiency out of the truss structural system if we actually extended it over two floors, with a significant saving in cost and carbon’, said Steve Toon of engineers AKTII. 

Whilst that was an important structural element, however, there were other lessons to be drawn too, said Mace’s Stuart McDonald. ‘If you take one thing away from the construction aspect of this’, he said, ‘please enjoy what you do and make sure that the culture is right – and it will be much more fun’.