adaptive reuse of existing former school building and thirteen new apartments / sustainable living
design 2007 - current

our involvement in unit 4, the former school hall at westwyck led to an invitation to a selective design competition for stage two of westwyck.
stage one [ which was deemed complete with the finalisation of unit 4 ] had encompassed the reworking of 7 rooms
[ generally former classrooms but also including the main hall ] into apartments, the provision of 5 new townhouses on the existing site and the development of a shared community garden to create an eco village of world renown.

the design brief for stage two, was to look at the remaining untouched areas within the original school building itself, as well as the undeveloped parcels of land to the east and west flanks of that building.
the overriding client intent was to further develop the core principals set up in stage one, those of environment and community.

the competition was open to two other design practices.

we felt extremely comfortable in the adaptive reuse of the former school building into the environmentally orientated apartments as that is our standard scope of works and so we concentrated most of our energies on the two new building forms.

the site context was heavily pushing the design response to produce a terrace form of buildings running north/east with common walls providing division.
we felt that this was a far to prescriptive answer and created building forms that provided one small elevation open to the northern orientation and so attempted to sculpture the building mass so to be responsive to prevailing breezes, solar orientation existing and projected movement pathway patterns, neighbouring properties and the significant heritage original school building.
Further this approach allowed us to stretch and twist our building form to create internal courtyard spaces that allowed a far more open gesture to the original school building
another major design issue was the integration of cars into the spaces. Our approach was different to both flanks. To the west we created a sunken internal court into which the cars came in an attempt to create a meeting place for the inhabitants as a first principal that also was a place for the storage of vehicles
The eastern side we created an under-croft into which we located the cars.

The brief outlined what the clients wished to achieve in regard to the number of dwellings but this was not necessarily pescriptive in nature. We choose to increase this marginally as we felt due to the size and nature of the available land medium density was the more appropriate approach.

We won
We have been endeavouring to progress the design working closely with landscape designers the project managers , engineers , traffic consultants heritage architects and town planners but to name a few.
The building has morphed since its first incarnation with cars being the main perpetrator however it still true to its original schematic intention.


project design team
tim o’sullivan architect
sioux clark interior designer
cassie southon
cimone macintosh
ro berry
sarah magennis

images
multiplicity