Architecture: Groupwork
Engineering: Webb Yates
Area: 2000 m2
Function: office and 8 apartments
Built: 2016–2017
Location: London, UK
Materials: limestone, concrete, steel
Cost: £ 4 600 000
Client: Amin Taha (the architect himself)
At 15 Clerkenwell Close in Islington, London, a six-storey apartment building with a basement, roof terrace, and load-bearing façade is built of limestone from Normandy.
The building consists of a system of mutually supporting columns and beams that form a stone exoskeleton. The latter in turn supports 200 mm thick and up to 8 m long concrete floor slabs and a concrete core that houses the stairs and elevator. Examining the façade of the building more closely, one is struck by its rusticity—the façade was intentionally left without finishing in order to highlight the history, origin and extraction process of the material, and the technical aspects of building with stone. Architect Amin Taha claims that building a load-bearing façade out of concrete would have been 25% more expensive, and the building would have had 90% more embodied carbon.
The completed building generated some controversy. Planning was initially granted for a design in which the load-bearing façade consisted of red bricks. The documents were later amended and bricks were replaced with limestone—this caused confusion about the intended appearance of the building. Soon after it was completed, a demolition order was issued for the building, in which it was insisted that its look is repulsive and extremely unfitting for the neighbourhood. In 2019, after nearly two years of judicial proceedings, the demolition order was withdrawn. In architectural circles, the building was almost unanimously approved of—in 2018, it was awarded two prestigious RIBA awards.
PHOTOS by Agnese Sanvito
PUBLISHED: MAJA 1-2024 (115) with main topic STONE
