The installer of the giant LED screens for Orms’ Outernet scheme are among the go-to suppliers named by practice director John McRae
Brilliant Stages was responsible for delivering the huge, floor-to-ceiling LED screens at the Outernet live events venue in London’s West End. This immersive gallery experience has two static screens and two kinetic screens which can slide away to open up the building.
Brilliant Stages normally works at major music events on technically difficult installations designed for ease of assembly and disassembly. Kinetic screens are much more specialist than fixed screens, and we needed Brilliant Stages to bring its expertise in these into a building setting. This was a first for the company – the big challenge was the constraints of the building structure and its tolerances, which all had to be worked through meticulously.
It was an extraordinary process. We started working with the company from Stage 4, and the process took about a year. Brilliant Stages designed and manufactured the moving columns that carry the screens, and built a prototype at its facility in Wakefield. We did drawings of every LED screen panel, and there was a lot of upfront work to get all the columns to align perfectly. With so many pixels on each screen, there was no room for alignment error.
The team embraced the challenges of structural tolerances and provided insight at each of the detailed workshops we held in both our office and their facility.
The screens show art and cultural content and are fundamental to the Outernet’s success. It is now one of the most visited UK attractions, with income from the screens a key part of the financial model for the new Outernet district.
Tekne is a specialist joinery contractor which worked with us on our new studio. We were first introduced to them when we both worked on The Standard hotel. When we were fitting out our own studio with interior designer Tutto Bene we realised that plywood joinery would be a big part of the project – we wanted a reception desk, gallery wall for samples, project storage close to each desk, and movable seating for events. So we approached Tekne. We liked the high quality of their work, and that they were up for the challenge of the limited lift space for bringing goods in, and designing for future disassembly. This approach resonates with our materials passport strategy, which aims to enable meaningful material reuse.
Once the concept for the joinery was established with Tutto Bene, Tekne developed the details to show us how they could make it happen, and for what cost. They were creative in how they used the plywood and the finishes, and maximised what they could get from each sheet to minimise waste. They designed furniture that could be sent in small units or flat-packed for ease of entry and then assembled on site.
The two mobile stepped seating platforms are also designed to store 24 stools. Tekne worked up the detail of the weight and size of the stools to make this idea work, and used gliders on the stools so that they don’t mark the floor.
We’ve now been in our new office for a couple of months and the seating steps are working well. They are so easy to pull out and reconfigure.
Tekne are very personable and their attention to detail is very good. Our team regularly visit their workshop in Poole and we really enjoy working with them. I’m sure we will collaborate again at some point.
Beispiel advises on public realm strategy and placemaking. We recently worked with its founding director, Sven Mündner, on the cultural offer of a couple of schemes that have successfully secured planning consent. Through detailed community engagement and analysis of people flow, he helped us to articulate what was needed in each area, and how we could interpret that within our schemes. In this way, we weren’t designing in isolation.
At the former Central Saint Martins site in Holborn, we drew on the spirit of the original Lethaby Building to propose new uses, including a cultural offering on the ground floor and a hotel above, with social housing in a separate block. Working with Sven informed the reinstatement of a pedestrian route through the site and the complex mixture of uses at street level. On the 2 Waterhouse Square site in Farringdon, Sven encouraged us to look back at the work of Alfred Waterhouse, which always had a social purpose, in order to look forward. Exploring the site’s history has resulted in complementary spaces to the adjacent Leather Lane market.
Beispiel (with Rory Olcayto) also helped us create our Ultrapractical handbook. This outlines the five key principles that guide our work, and has been particularly useful in our design reviews and informing how we communicate our projects to clients.
We enjoy working with Sven and his team as he works collaboratively, listens, and interrogates design. He likes to explore all available opportunities to understand if we can provide more social value in our projects.
As circularity moves up in the conversation, the more elements of Cat A offices we can get repurposed, the better. This is something we’ve tackled in our material passports strategy. Recycling should be the last resort; we should be reusing as much as possible.
We have recently worked with ceiling manufacturer SAS to take back its ceiling tiles from four of our refurbishment schemes. They will be reconditioned and restocked for future use. It’s a new model we have developed with the company as part of our circularity drive.
The initiative began when we were redesigning 20 Air Street for the Crown Estate, which was refurbishing a 10-year-old fit-out with a lot of suspended SAS ceiling tiles. We asked SAS if it would help us find an alternative to sending these to landfill, and worked through all the options with it. In the end, we took them down, cleaned them and reinstated them. On 75 London Wall they have been carefully removed, packaged up to be taken away for reconditioning, and we’re hoping to be able to reuse them on another of our projects.
The key thing is keeping things out of landfill to reduce the associated embodied carbon, which is significant. Getting the manufacturer to take them back is the first stage, but the Holy Grail is getting them back into another one of our projects.
We’ve also been working with Saint-Gobain, which is now coming to sites to take back glass. And we are supporting Recolight’s lighting reuse hub, which is a WEEE-compliant database of nearly-new fittings that can be collected and reused on other schemes.
John McRae is a director of Orms
As told to Pamela Buxton