Solar Townhouse Primrose Hill, Northwest London residential interior, English property images
Solar Townhouse in Primrose Hill
5 September 2024
Architects: Archi-Tectonics
Location: Primrose Hill, north west London, England, UK
Photos: Nick Kane
Solar Townhouse, London
Archi-Tectonics expanded a century-old brick townhouse in the heart of London into a modern home that is double its original size for a family of four. The New York design firm turned the unique historic character of the existing 2-story solid masonry structure, as well as its compact neighborhood setting, into a design opportunity—creating an exemplary prototype for high-density urban living.
The Solar Townhouse project is the latest addition to their series of broader explorations to create sustainable housing models for city-living, following 512 GW Townhouse, 497 Greenwich building, and Blaak Tower.
The 2250 square-feet London Solar Townhouse is designed with the notion that ‘small is beautiful’, something that can be traced back to the early modernists of Europe and America who used this as a premise in their search for the most ergonomic and frugal housing unit.
While their solutions leaned towards what is just enough to live comfortably, Archi-Tectonics have maximized richness and complexity to create a 4-dimensional interplay of spaces linked across two eras in time and intricately crafted with shifts in movement, perspective, and materiality.
The house’s manifold attachments to the adjacent structures and surrounding vegetation served as the guide to the proposed volumetric extrusions that establish an otherness within the existing context.
The original structure is left intact to maintain the largely opaque building edges and serve as the foundational base for the new intervention. It is treated as the structural core, off of which a multi-faceted roof extension enveloping an additional story and other hovering projections emerges.
The intersection between the folded zinc-and-glass envelope and the densely packed program within generates several distinctly-formed apertures such as the pyramidal skylight in the kitchen, a glass slit in the living room exposing what used to be a narrow rear yard, and a fully glazed window revealing the panoramic view of the streetscape below framed by an old-growth tree.
The terrace at the roof level extends the kitchen and dining room toward the exterior and offers a moment of outdoor respite amidst the surrounding foliage and neighborhood roofscape. The roof is lined with fully integrated PV panels that provide the almost off-the-grid building with baseline electricity sufficient to run heat pumps, hot water supply, lighting, as well as a 13kW Tesla battery to charge an electric car.
At the heart of a building is a custom-built winding stair that connects the entrance floor with the double-height living area above and the open kitchen-and-dining on the topmost level. The organic and fluid geometry of this solid-steel helix form connects all public areas of the house in one continuous sweep, thus creating a sculptural vortex of daylit space.
Here, density and richness condense together to create a singular object that is both extremely efficient and strikingly beautiful. This stair embodies Archi-Tectonics’ unique sensibility as architects to marry design intelligence, manufacturing expertise, and dynamic form-optimization to go beyond mere problem-solving.
The sculptural corporality and rich textures of the interiors are a deliberate departure from the typically rationalist and frugal effect of compact dwellings. High-contrast black raw wood cladding and cabinetry, textured stone surfaces, and brass mosaics are highlighted by soft glowing light coves. Precious glass pendants elevate the atmosphere indoors, while complementing the organically-shaped wood furniture and natural wool rugs.
Solar Townhouse in Primrose Hill, Northwest London – Building Information
Architects: Archi-Tectonics – https://www.archi-tectonics.com/
Client: Private
Project Type: 3-story Residential renovation and extension
Status: Completed 2024
Location: Primrose Hill, London, UK
Area: 2250 sf
Design: Archi-Tectonics NYC LLC,
Principal: Winka Dubbeldam
Team: Justin Korhammer, Max Boerman, Wouter vander Heuvel, Mattia Gola, Santiago Herrera
Architect of Record: Anthony Boulanger (AY Architects)
Structural Engineer: AKTII
MEP: WSP London
Lighting Design: Lana Lenar
General Contractor: Philiam
About Archi-Tectonics
Founded in 1994 by Professor Winka Dubbeldam, Archi-Tectonics NYC, LLC is a research-design studio with offices in New York City, Amsterdam, and Hangzhou. Professor Winka Dubbeldam is also the Chair of the Department of Architecture at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia USA. Dubbeldam and Justin Korhammer, partner since 2016, lead a multi-national team of architects, engineers and consultants that work across scales and types.
The studio’s design approach is rooted in systems thinking, exploring the interrelations between cities, buildings, environments, developing innovative designs optimized across all aspects of a project—from parametrics, 3D printing and manufacturing to performance and user experience. Resulting in buildings that have character and identity, that derive inspiration from the far past to excel in the global future. Archi-Tectonics recently won the 2023 CTBUH Award of Excellence in the Urban Habitat Category for the Asian Games 2023 Masterplan, the Architizer 2023 A+ Award in the Architecture +Innovation Category for the Asian Games 2023 Hybrid Stadium. Archi-Tectonics’ fourth book “Strange Objects, New Solids, and Massive Things” was launched Fall 2021 [Actar, Spain] and was part of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 with the exhibit “Strange Objects” in Palazzo Bembo.
Photography: Nick Kane
Solar Townhouse, Primrose Hill, Northwest London images / information received 050924
Location: Primrose Hill, north west London, England
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