Key Services:
Architects' Service & Fee Advice, Art & Architecture, Building Standards Issues, Competition Entries, Contract Administration, Energy / Environmental Expertise, Feasibility Studies, Full Architectural Service, Planning Applications, Sustainable Design | | | Description:
Woodstock Apartments, a new block of flats in North Oxford, is a paradigm for the radical yet sensitive densification of sustainable suburbs.
It sits comfortably among its neighbours by respecting the parameters of the built context: building line, ridge line, eaves line, materials. But just as the local houses are clearly of their time – Gothic, Arts&Crafts, Georgian – so is this building unabashedly contemporary, with its cantilevered cuboids, the dramatic cleft marking the entrance, and the shimmering bronze cladding to its upper floors.
But this building is not just about form-making. It acts as a benchmark for a radical programme of Contextual Densification. The plot previously accommodated a single family house with a high carbon footprint. By contrast the new building contains 7 apartments with a possible occupancy of over 24 residents, increasing the number of residents by 5 times. |
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Key Services:
Architects' Service & Fee Advice, Art & Architecture, Community Development, Competition Entries, Energy / Environmental Expertise, Full Architectural Service, Interior Design, Party Wall Advice, Planning Advice, Planning Applications, Principal Designer, Sustainable Design | | | Description:
Vishuddha Yoga Centre is a new, purpose-built studio intended to serve Oxford’s whole yoga community. A feasibility study showed that the existing building could not accommodate the full brief, so the decision was made to go for a new-build studio, with the proviso that it had to minimise embodied energy and operational energy. This chimed not only with the ethos of our practice, but also with the practice of yoga which demands efficiency and low consumption. The building is respectful of its neighbours and modest in scale and while the form of the building takes cues from its neighbours, it does not mimic them in composition or material. The conservation officers accepted that the new building should be different from its neighbours, maintaining the visual break in the terrace. So, the façade is a contemporary composition clad entirely in dark copper enhanced with prepatinated copper on the facetted reveals, highlighting the apertures in views along the street. The interior is all about using natural light and natural materials to enhance the yoga experience, while at the same time allowing the building to tell its own truth.
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| 6: Project Name | Incurvo |
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| Dates: | 2011 - 2015 | | Location: | Oxfordshire | | Gross Area: | 500 to 999 sqm | Sectors:
Houses and Housing - One-off Houses | | |
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Key Services:
Architects' Service & Fee Advice, Competition Entries, Contract Administration, Materials Advice, Planning Applications, Post Occupancy Evaluation, Sustainable Design | | | Awards:
RIBA South Award 2017
RIBA South Sustainability Award 2017
| Description:
The house is a viscous form petrified, an English butte which grows out of the organic folds of its setting. The strong sense of movement is expressed in the sinuous brick carapace. The local brick has a luminous earthy orange hue, seemingly still bright from the heat of the kiln; this house exploits both the extraordinary plasticity of the humble brick, and its rough, tough sense of rootedness.
Inside too is all about curves and movement; the lofty entrance hall draws the visitor in and then left, right, and up as the space diverges in all directions. The end destinations are the foci of the majestic curved windows which offer panoramic views of the garden, water, trees and rolling Chilterns landscape beyond.
With respect to sustainability, Incurvo is as close to a Passivhaus as a curvy house can be: it meets the most stringent benchmarks for insulation, thermal bridging, airtightness and thermal comfort. It has three separate renewable energy systems. It has been designed as a Lifetime Home, and built in materials which will age gracefully with no need for maintenance.
Incurvo is designed to last for many lifetimes with the lightest of touches on the planet, and to lift the spirit for just as long. |
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| 7: Project Name | Hill Top House |
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| Dates: | 2009 - 2012 | | Location: | Oxford | | Gross Area: | 100 to 249 sqm | Sectors:
Houses and Housing - One-off Houses | | |
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Key Services:
Architects' Service & Fee Advice, Planning Advice, Planning Applications, Project Management | | | Awards:
RIBA Downland Award Winner 2012
Concrete Society Best Concrete Building 2013 Overall Winner
RIBA Stephen Lawrence Award shortlist 2012
| Description:
An exquisite essay in concrete for clients who relish the uncompromising ascetic quality of the material. It may sound hifalutin, but this house really is a kind of poetry: the design is all about expressing the base beauty of concrete: the very antithesis of bling.
All the main elements of the building £ the walls, floors, ceilings, stairs, roof £ are polished panels of precast concrete, made off-site, delivered and assembled like a vast house of cards. The house is organised so these raw panels are left completely unfettered by fittings, services and clutter.
The highly disciplined plan has long enfilades down each side so the concrete flank walls run right through from front to back, washed by daylight from full-height windows displaying the distant view. And then the staircase! A concrete causeway cascading down a sheer-sided canyon shimmering in sunshine flooding from above. Oh boy. |
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| 8: Project Name | Wycliffe Hall |
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| Dates: | 2017 - (ongoing) | | Location: | Oxford | | Gross Area: | 1,000 to 1,999 sqm | Sectors:
Houses and Housing - Student Housing | | |
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Key Services:
Architects' Service & Fee Advice, Materials Advice, Sustainable Design | | | Description:
The project has progressed as far as a reasonably detailed concept design, as illustrated, but now hit the planning buffers and is currently on hold.
AJA have used the commission to explore, test and evolve a solution for just what 21st century student accommodation should be. The purpose being not just to determine room sizes and facilities but also to address the issues of student mental health and well-being, modern methods of construction, sustainability through Passivhaus parameters, and how to build anew in a highly sensitive context adjacent to listed buildings in a Conservation Area. This project will act as a springboard for the practice in the design of future similar education buildings. |
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| 9: Project Name | St Michael’s Threshold |
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| Dates: | 2012 - 2018 | | Location: | Oxford | | Gross Area: | 100 to 249 sqm | Sectors:
Religious Buildings - Christian | | |
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Key Services:
Architects' Service & Fee Advice, Materials Advice, Planning Applications, Post Occupancy Evaluation | | | Description:
Our front extension creates a new threshold for the church: a large entrance lobby plus those crucial ancillary spaces every assembly building needs like a kitchen, loos, stores and an office. But the new lobby is not just a lobby; it is itself a lofty space with its own special character. The huge toplight and the circular timber crown in the ceiling give it a numinous quality as befits a pukka narthex. This is the space that mediates between the secular and the sacred.
And how to build on the front of a glorious if eccentric church? The new addition doesn’t try to hide the curious historical anomaly of the brick west wall. It is designed as if the church interior has oozed out of the entrance doors and set hard as a brick lozenge around an expansive glazed entrance screen addressing the public footpath through the churchyard. This is a building at once sheltering and welcoming, which opens the church to the world and sets up a progressive sequence of increasingly special spaces from path to porch to narthex to nave.
Getting here was not an easy process: building on the front of a listed and loved church is something that requires – quite rightly – very careful scrutiny by multiple bodies, both statutory and corporeal. But the design was welcomed by English Heritage, the planners, the diocese, the parish and the locals. |
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| 10: Project Name | Corus Colorcoat Construction Office |
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| Dates: | 2007 - 2009 | | Location: | Shotton | | Gross Area: | 2,000 to 4,999 sqm | Sectors:
Industrial - Research, Offices - Owner Occupied | | |
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Key Services:
Full Architectural Service | | | Description:
This will be the new HQ for the Corus Colorcoat division based in Shotton North Wales, where Colorcoat pre-finished steel products are manufactured. It will bring together 180 staff in an exemplar building designed to demonstrate how steel can inform leading edge sustainable design.
The Construction Office will be a striking new landmark at the entrance to the Corus site. The strong circular form of the 3800sq.m four storey office will be highly visible in its location in front of the huge production sheds and adjacent to the freshwater cooling lagoons. The design makes the most of both the coating process and lagoons as innovative sources of energy: surplus steam and heat from the coatings plant will be harnessed to heat the new offices, and the lagoons will be used as a heat sink to cool the building. The central atrium will enable the building to be naturally ventilated.
The external skin of the drum is expressed in finned, curved walls which incorporate Corus deep profile cladding. The curve is accentuated by sweeping screens of steel mesh which float in front of the main office elevations providing solar protection but allowing uninterrupted views out. Throughout the building inside and out Corus products are specified to highlight their quality, versatility and sustainability credentials.
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