Studio Idealyc’s pyramid scheme

09 January 2009

Writing in the 1930s, Danish architect Steen Eiler Rasmussen identified the intimate combination of architecture and landscape as a defining characteristic of London. Major open spaces like Hyde Park and Hampstead Heath engender great affection in the minds of Londoners, although many people live too far from the major parks to make regular use of them. Smaller-scale public spaces often suffer from lack of investment and can quickly fall out of use if they are not perceived as safe.

In the past few years, Islington Council in north London has been making a concerted effort to improve some of the open spaces under its charge. The latest to benefit is Spa Fields, a 15ha area tucked away behind the trendy restaurants of Exmouth Market in Clerkenwell. After four years of regeneration work by landscape consultant Parklife, it has been transformed into a brightly coloured jamboree of vegetation and landforms, an achievement that was highly commended in the best community-based planning initiative category at the London Planning Awards in 2007.

Among the artificial mounds and play equipment is a 9m-high copper pyramid known affectionately as the Hut. Designed by Francisco de Asis Checa Romero, a recent architecture graduate of the Royal College of Art, the Hut is a two-storey building containing the headquarters for Islington’s park ranger team for the south of the borough, a youth centre and a community room. Incredibly, Romero won the commission while on his year out through a contact at Parklife; he has set up a practice, Studio Idealyc, on the back of it. His initial proposal went down well with the client, so Parklife took him on as a subconsultant and supported him throughout the project.

Credit: Photos by Nathan Willock/View

Natural light enters the building through the glass and mesh-clad “chimney”.

In the past, the poverty of the surrounding neighbourhoods had attracted various insalubrious activities to Spa Fields. A newspaper article from 1768 describes an organised fight with the prize of a new smock, “won by a woman called Bruising Peg, who beat her antagonist in a terrible manner”. In an attempt at gentrification in 1770, the Fields were laid out as a tea garden, but this closed after four years and the site then became a burial ground notorious for the awful condition in which it was kept. There were tales of coffins being exhumed and burned in a bone house to make room for fresh burials, causing a public outcry, after which it was converted to a public garden and children’s playground in 1886.

Two distinctive buildings border Spa Fields close to the Hut: the Church of the Holy Redeemer, an Italian renaissance-style basilica by John Dando Sedding presents a tall gable wall of banded orange and yellow brick to the park; while to the south-west is Berthold Lubetkin’s 1938 Finsbury Health Centre, a seminal building both because of its modernist architecture and its openness to users.

Far from being intimidated by such weighty neighbours, Romero has engaged in a dialogue with them. The pyramid was initially to be 15m high, but this was rejected by the planners and the whole scheme reduced in size. The pyramid form comes from the baroque symbolism of Hawksmoor, whose churches have become important points in the psychogeographical map of London.

Romero also refers to John Hejduk’s exploration of the power of form to carry symbolic, mythological and emotional meaning, suggesting something of the site’s morbid history, while also adding a new layer.

On the north-east side facing the main park gate, the pyramid is tilted back on sloping walls to make an entrance, deforming in the process. A glass and mesh-clad “chimney” juts out of the pyramid roof to bring light down into the stairwell and encourage natural ventilation, a deliberate memory of the bone house chimney.

The Hut is built directly on the footprint of its predecessor, a single-storey utilitarian park pavilion, and retains the original concrete slab and some of its walls. The timber-framed structure envelops the original walls in what Romero calls a second skin, creating little interstitial spaces — in which the park rangers store their gardening tools. The interior is basic in the downstairs rooms, but a nicely detailed timber screen leads to a stair to the rangers’ office above, which is lined in spruce-faced plywood with rooflights to provide light from several directions.

Vandalism and antisocial behaviour are the biggest threats to the park. Fears that the copper would be stolen have so far proved unfounded, and the steep roof pitch with no gutters makes it difficult for anyone to climb onto the building. Spa Fields’ catchment area is a fragmented, varied socio-economic community, so for Parklife an important part of the design and construction process was to involve the community and encourage positive interactions. Local groups were specifically trained to help in the Hut’s construction, and so far it has suffered little abuse.

Romero had a far from easy ride for his first project, and it is an achievement in itself that he didn’t simply run out of steam. The Hut cost £270,000, considerably more than the original £100,000 budget, and it took over a year to build. The contractor tried to change the cladding to zinc, then aluminium, an important battle Romero eventually won. During the day, the patinating copper blends well with the surrounding brickwork, and at dusk, just when a greater presence is required, light from inside transforms the building into a lantern, indicating a human presence.

“At the start, I didn’t know anything” Romero admits, but he certainly wasn’t short of ideas. A small project so conceptually rich could easily become overcomplicated, but the discipline of the single material amalgamates the intention into a form that is both powerful and appropriate to its location. Studio Idealyc is now working on a couple of domestic extensions, but after the success of Spa Fields it can only be a matter of time before it wins another public project.

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