The sustainability-focused architecture practice's go-to contacts include a professor of planting design, a bespoke joiner and a specialist in green oak carpentry
Nigel is professor of planting design and urban horticulture at the University of Sheffield and one of the world’s leading voices on innovative approaches to planting design. He is a fantastic collaborator. A lot of his research is into horticultural ecologies that can address problems of climate change and biodiversity loss in cities. He is very practised at understanding the constraints and opportunities in public green space.
His way of working is very aligned with ours, where ideas develop through the simultaneous consideration of practical issues and poetic ideals.
We first worked with Nigel at Peveril Gardens, a public garden and studios on a repurposed garage block in Bermondsey for the London Borough of Southwark. We wanted to establish a dense garden, and the capacity of the structure was a big constraint. It required a level of knowledge and experience that we knew Nigel had from his work at the Barbican.
Our vision was to make the garden a small oasis on the edge of the Old Kent Road – a place where people could come and spend time. There were a lot of roundtable meetings to look at the constraints and how we could transform a barren 1960s asphalt rooftop into something thriving, biodiverse and open to the public.
As the building was already working quite hard structurally, it wasn’t possible to get the soil depth we wanted uniformly across the deck without upgrading the structure. Instead, we worked with Nigel and the structural engineers to create soil depth for deeper planting where the structure could take it, with shallower soil elsewhere on the deck. He then attuned the plant mixes to the soil depths and site conditions. The roof deck couldn’t take a tree, so we planted it in the ground to grow up through an opening in the roof.
We’re now working with Nigel on a bigger project: a headquarters for the park operations teams on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford. The site is the decommissioned Old Ford pumping station, which was built for the 2012 games and which we’re retrofitting. Nigel knows the ecology of the Olympic Park extremely well because he was part of the original planting design team. Alongside the ecologist Gary Grant, we are developing a landscape and planting scheme that includes a working maintenance yard and still creates a biodiversity net gain on the site, which is quite tricky within an existing nature reserve.
Rumi is an experienced urban designer and place-shaping consultant specialising in socially orientated, bottom-up regeneration. We met when we won the competition for Peveril Gardens in Bermondsey and she was our client at the London Borough of Southwark.
We’re interested in improving the city through ground-up adaptive reuse, achieved in connection with the people who live in it. Rumi has the knowledge, skill set and political understanding to make these projects happen. She has a real appreciation of architecture’s potential in that process. Our collaboration is a very fruitful, ongoing conversation. We respect and enjoy the ideas that we each bring to the table.
She has an amazing knowledge of London and where small, community-driven architectural interventions have made an impact. She also understands the pragmatic process required to make it happen. For example, at Bermondsey, she understood the importance of maintenance when looking to establish a new public garden and made sure it was budgeted for long term. She also realised there was a community energy around gardening, and connected with people who wanted to be involved, establishing a consultation process that engaged a lot of local gardeners.
We subsequently worked with her on the Holyrood Street pavilion and garden near London Bridge, also for Southwark and won through competition. Here, we made a business case for creating a coffee shop kiosk within a small but hugely impactful urban garden. This is a part of a masterplan for the whole of Holyrood Street.
We enjoy operating on an urban scale, and recently collaborated with Rumi’s practice on a placemaking and sustainability action plan for Neasden Town Centre. This was our first action plan and was helpful for us in better understanding the process of starting change. We put forward a series of case-study projects, from quick, low-hanging fruits to longer-term strategies. The plan has been used successfully and raised just over £3 million from the Mayor of London’s Civic Partnership Programme.
Structure Workshop are a team of brilliant structural engineers. They’ve made it their agenda to minimise embodied carbon in their structural engineering solutions.
We approached them to work with us several years ago knowing that our values were aligned since we are interested in reducing embodied carbon through thoughtful design.
We first worked together on the adaptive reuse of three warehouses in west London, and we’ve recently completed a house extension with them in Hackney, London. This uses a timber primary structure with infill panels of hemp, which is carbon-positive. It’s a small project but we’d like to use it as a case study for extending Victorian houses in a sustainable way. We’re also working with Structure Workshop on the park headquarters project at the former Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in Stratford. We’re reusing and reorganising a lot of the existing primary, secondary and tertiary structural elements. As we’ve developed design options, they’ve worked out the embodied carbon implications, ensuring that minimising embodied carbon is embedded in the design process.
We are interested in architecture at all scales, from big urban and territorial ideas through to the tiny details. We design a lot of joinery – the things you touch, such as doors, windows and fitted furniture. To create these finely crafted architectural elements, we love working with Cab Workshop, an exceptional joinery company, which is brilliant at finding efficient and economic solutions to bespoke requirements.
Cab is making doors, windows and several furniture pieces with us for a private project in the Surrey Hills. We designed all the elements but there has been lots of back and forth with Cab on the construction detail, material selection, finish, and installation logistics. One of the factors that can restrict the use of highly bespoke joinery is cost, and Cab’s team are quite unique in their interest in collaboration; they bring lots of thoughtful solutions to the table. They also produce clear and precise 3D workshop drawings.
We took the whole team down to Cab’s workshop in Lewes this summer, which was fantastic. They took us through their timber selection process, their tools, how they set them up in the workshop, and how this affects what they can make. We also discussed materials, finishes and glues at length with them. We share an ambition to build sustainably and without the use of harmful products such as formaldehyde. The knowledge we gain from this sort of collaboration percolates back into our projects from an early stage.
The Green Oak Carpentry Company
We’re very keen on collaborations with makers, often working together to explore low-carbon avenues that are bespoke and require collective effort.
We’re working with Green Oak Carpentry on a large green oak structure for our private project in the Surrey Hills. They bring 30 years of unique knowledge and understanding of a very traditional form of construction. They’re also interested in pushing that tradition into different places through collaborative design development.
They have created some amazing oak structures over the years, including Cullinan Studio’s Gridshell at the Weald and Downland Museum, and are real experts in green oak carpentry. While developing the details of our project, they came into the studio and did a CPD event which went right back into the history of green oak carpentry. We also visited their workshop to understand a bit more about their traditional construction methods, which are amazingly low tech. Through ongoing dialogue with them, both us and our client were able to understand how the green oak structure will evolve over time.
Green oak framing is part of the Wealden vernacular and is surprisingly cost-effective in this area. Working with forward-thinking local specialists like Green Oak Carpentry, using the materials and techniques they know, has enriched the building. We’ve been able to use the project to develop our own knowledge of this material. There were lots of conversations with Green Oak Carpentry before we were confident about how the structure would inform the architecture of the project and the atmosphere of the interior.
Tom Benton and Carlos Sanchez are co-founders of Sanchez Benton
As told to Pamela Buxton