Small Office

Architect’s Club

London, England
2015



Architects are trained to be able to relate anything to architecture. Their profession consists of being able to take any problem and resolve it through design. This creates an overwhelming feeling within the profession and a constant desire to escape work; a necessity to get away from it all. London is one of the more popular cities for architectural offices. The specific neighborhood Clerkwell is the home of numerous fresh and progressive architectural offices and schools such as the Bartlett and the AA. This becomes the ideal location for an Architecture Club, one that can provide the above mentioned escape. To do so, this proposal provides a space to get away from it all and at the same time it provides the all. The club ignores the existing context and creates a solid block on the entire site. The building wraps around the existing houses located on the site to provide a sense of grounding and beginning for the rest of the building.

The entrance is located at House #1 which remains unchanged, as the club members moves to the second floor of the house The Club begins to emerge as a series of distortions from normative to the architectural. The building distances the architect from the outside world and squeezes him into a world of itself through a gradient of highly public to highly private spaces until the architect reaches his/her private room from which he/she is able to escape down into the underground communal bath.

The bath is lit through the light shafts which carve the interior of the building illuminating the rest of the spaces. The club thus exists in a tension between the constant desire to get away from it all for architecture while always returning to it all through architecture.