It must be the ironing board with the most beautiful view in the capital. On the top floor of the new London College of Fashion, in a prime corner usually reserved for a boardroom, a student is busy pressing his clothes in front of a rolling panorama of the Olympic Park and the towers of the city beyond. Behind the dizzying ironing station, past rows of sewing machines, a great void plunges down the building, past floors of pattern cutters and jewelers, cobblers and prosthetic sculptors, while dizzying staircases criss-cross back and forth and reveal this multi-storey world of making. connect each other. .
‘A mill building for the 21st century’ is how the architects, Allies & Morrison, describe the £216 million new home for LCF, a 16-storey fashion factory on the banks of the Waterworks River in Stratford, opposite London’s docks. Stadium. It is a suitable location for such a hive of production. Before the steamroller of Olympic regeneration arrived here, these riverbanks were home to belt makers and sheepskin tailors, rag dealers and wig suppliers, housed in an assortment of sheds next to car scrapyards and aggregate crushers.
The students are visually very exciting – we didn’t want our architecture to compete
“We wanted to celebrate the area’s history as an industrial site,” says architect Bob Allies, explaining how his team drew inspiration from the Yardley soap factory, a 1905 brick mill building that once stood on Carpenters Road nearby. “The college is not just about glamorous people in flowy dresses. It is one of the few places where serious crafts survive.”
Glamor is not the first thing you think of when you first see the building from the park. It is the largest block in the East Bank’s cultural district, towering between the folded origami shell of the V&A East and the angular shapes of the BBC music studios and Sadler’s Wells East – all due to open next year. It looks a bit like a cool office building compared to the boisterous facets of the V&A, which were apparently inspired by a Balenciaga dress. There are no such fashionable allusions for LCF. “It had to be tough,” says Allies.
The feeling of a head office softens as you get closer and notice details such as the finely scalloped concrete cladding reminiscent of needle-string ribbons, and the zigzag-sawtooth roofline, a factory-like symbol – much like the RCA’s new home in Battersea – to make this a place. A heroic 15 meter high colonnade of heavy concrete columns marches along the front, lifting the building upwards to preserve views of the V&A, while a steep cascade of terraced seating cascades down to the towpath, creating an inviting place to relax on sunny days. to sit . In the summer, the council plans to hold catwalk shows under the colonnade – a spectacle that should help bring some of the hoped-for buzz from the South Bank to these manicured riverbanks. Yet there remains something uneasy about the way this row of locations is connected, like a broken-down car, with a plethora of windbreak screens bolted between some buildings in an awkward afterthought.
Step into LCF and you’ll forget most of these problems. A great swoosh of concrete flows down from the floor above, curling into a tight corkscrew as it plunges underground, and undulating into oval arches that hang overhead like curling orange peels, forming one of the most dramatic new lobbies in London .
“We had a lot of Borromini on our desk when we designed the staircase,” says project architect Bruno Marcelino, referring to the master of Italian Baroque whose sublime interiors swelled with gravity. Here the architects have created a kind of brutalist baroque, with the structural elements withdrawn to celebrate their tectonic power. The curves are also a product of structural necessity: for example, the tight curves of the ceiling beams are the result of the way in which internal steel bars had to be post-tensioned. It’s a theatrical, layered space that you can imagine students using for their shows, with outrageous outfits flowing down this three-dimensional catwalk. And probably not just during the show.
“The students are visually very exciting,” says Marcelino. “So we didn’t want our architecture to compete too much.” A simple palette of exposed concrete, black steel and blond maple runs throughout the building, providing a neutral backdrop for the colorful residents. The architects have refrained from using too many fashion motifs: a textile pattern that was to be cast into the concrete columns in an earlier design did not materialize. But there are some subtle nods, such as shutters perforated with a stitch pattern, and grillwork reminiscent of the geometric facade of the former LCF campus on Oxford Street.
Founded in 1906 as the union of three trade schools, the college was spread across six sites in the city, none of which was purpose-built. “It’s great that all departments are together for the first time,” said Professor Andrew Teverson, head of the university. “We are curious about what synergies will arise. Our previous homes were all hidden, but here we have a real public face.”
Unusually, the lower floors of the building are completely open to the public. You can walk inside. You can use the café, visit an exhibition in the waterfront gallery (currently showing postgraduate work) and even walk up the spiral staircase to observe all kinds of workshops. takes place on the ‘makers square’. Display cases displaying student work line a public route at the foot of the building, connecting a (forthcoming) bus stop to the river, making it feel like a porous part of this emerging slice of the city, rather than a closed-off campus .
Upstairs, teaching spaces envelop the ‘heart space’ of stairs and open work areas, with large internal windows offering views of interns, milliners and make-up artists learning their trade. The rooms form long enfilades of studios and workshops, which can be connected and adapted as educational needs evolve, and they are full of thoughtful details. Noticing how students were using the windowsills of LCF’s Shepherd’s Bush campus as workspace, the architects designed the studio windows with deeply tapered openings and window seats that can double as workbenches. Several floors open onto outdoor terraces, where you can walk outside via stairs between the floors on the upper floors, adding to the feeling of a cozy campus with a courtyard turned on its side – a rare quality that you can reach in a 16-storey tower.
The students seem excited, commenting on how the open spaces are “refreshing and enjoyable to work in”, while another says the sense of departmental mixing “feels very special for collaborations”. Waiting for the elevators is difficult, says another, even though there are eight of them. All the more reason to take the so-called “Harry Potter stairs” and enjoy the vertical promenade past body casting and cosmetic testing, hairdressing and fabric dyeing.
Fashion is the second most polluting industry in the world after fossil fuels, and all the exposed concrete makes you wonder about the carbon footprint of the building itself (despite it achieving BREEAM Outstanding, the highest sustainability rating). The architects emphasize that wood would not have been feasible on this scale, and that additional carbon savings were made by leaving the surfaces bare and avoiding the usual plasterboard coverings. Allies says if they were designing the project now, they would explore other options for the concrete cladding. Longevity is, as always, given as the main justification. “We’ve been around for 117 years,” says Teverson, “and we want to be here for at least another 117 years.” As Marcelino puts it: the building is “a sustainable bookcase, where you can always change the books”.
Like the integration of Central Saint Martins art school into the private real estate citadel of Kings Cross as a catalyst for instant cool, bringing this bustling fashion factory here was a smart move, and hopefully it will breathe some subversive life into what could be to arise. have felt like an over-cleaned area. It’s also good for the college. Teverson says they are already charting a new conservation course using their new state-of-the-art archive space in collaboration with the upcoming V&A East Storehouse across the park, which will house the museum’s collection in an open-access archive.
With the new block of University College London to the south and the base of Loughborough University to the west, the somewhat disjointed vision for ‘Olympicopolis’ is gradually coming to fruition twelve years after the Games. What makes this possible will become apparent in the coming years, when four towers of mainly private flats rise at the end of the East Bank’s £628 million cultural terrace to help pay for it all. That is the Faustian pact of Olympian regeneration.