There was a time when an architectural idea could run through a building like letters through a stick of rock, when everything from a door handle to a city block would express the same intent. What a building looked like, the way it was made, its plan and forms, its detail and decoration, would all pull together. This could be true of any style, from Arts and Crafts to Palladian to brutalist. It required the architect to be in charge, to have an overall directing eye.
Those days have, with a few exceptions, gone. The architect is now one consultant among many, and the component parts of a building – frame, cladding, heating and ventilating, finishes – are delivered in packages by different subcontractors. The parts tend to coexist rather than cohere. The London practice of Henley Halebrown, however, won’t take this shift lying down. Its inspirations include the Philadelphian Louis Kahn and the Glaswegians Gillespie, Kidd and Coia – architects who made their poetry out of the substance and mass of their buildings.
In a recent conversion of two Edwardian industrial buildings in De Beauvoir Town in east London, which makes them into studio spaces for small businesses, Henley Halebrown has inserted beautifully composed staircases through the joists and floorboards of the old building, geometrically graceful arrays of curved balustrades and straight beams that rise towards light falling from above. Its Chadwick Hall, a student residence in Roehampton, south-west London, completed in 2016, presents an imposing array of brick piers and concrete beams. The heft of buildings like this, though, is partly illusory: behind the visible masonry there’s usually a concealed frame, which is doing the main job of holding the building up.
Its latest completed project a block of student housing, incubator workspaces and artists’ studios in on Stour Road in Hackney Wick, east London, is another work of part-fictional heft. Wick Park takes its cue from the industrial buildings that once stood around here, including a long-lost piano factory on the site of the new building, and in some cases still do. It’s a common enough idea to build modern versions of Victorian warehouses, but Henley Halebrown has pursued it with special vim.
In general, student housing has become one of the least generous and most cynical of 21st-century building types, where the tininess of each dwelling unit manifests in tinny exteriors where the temporary homes of young people are stacked up like products in an Amazon distribution centre. Here, the architects have designed a wrapping of brick pillars and shallow concrete arches with a sense of substance that is almost ancient Roman.
Deep-set windows reinforce the sense of substance. The bricks, concrete and most of the metal window frames and balustrades are in different tones of pinkish brown, which gives the whole a bodily coherence. The width between each pillar contains two student rooms, and the arches occur every two storeys, such that the outer wall is composed of modules framing four rooms each, which gives a grand scale to the exterior.
The planning is thoughtful, with all rooms facing outwards, and a sociable inner courtyard, its floor raised up a level to stop it being too deep, overlooked by corridors and shared kitchens. Another courtyard is flanked on one side by the artists’ studios, which have been given a deep, multistorey loggia that allows work to be taken outside.
In case it all gets too sonorous, there’s variety. In one area the metalwork becomes pale turquoise, and one of the courts is whitish rather than the prevailing pinkish. Inside both courtyards the outer order of pillars and arches changes to a different one of posts and beams, with emphatic, slightly mannered blocks where they intersect. Connoisseurs of 1960s architecture may see the influence of Howell Killick Partridge & Amis, a practice that designed several fine university buildings.
There are a few bum notes in this work of Romano brutalism, arising from the fact that the architects had a limited role in the detailed design, once planning permission had been granted. There are also infantilising, candy-coloured interiors that are nothing to do with Henley Halebrown. But the nobility of the architecture survives.
The same is true of another recent project, the Thames Christian school next to Clapham Junction in south London, a calm six-storey cuboid in pale brick, which holds its own next to a high railway embankment and large housing blocks from the 1960s and the present. Rhythms of large and small windows impart a sense of civic dignity: it has the mood of a town hall or a church, without being either.
Inside the building, classrooms are arranged around two courtyards, each raised two storeys up and open on one side. Beneath them is a base containing the school hall and a Baptist chapel, which is a separate institution from the school. Taken together, the largely opaque outside and the open inside impart protection and shelter, within which the inner life of the school can take place, and different parts feel a sense of connection with each other.
Here, Henley Halebrown had even less influence in the later stages of the design than at Wick Park, with the result that this is a good building with a great one struggling to get out. It’s as if the school, especially inside, has been washed with an astringent agent that has stripped such things as balustrades and internal finishes of whatever interest and pleasure they might have given.
You could call Henley Halebrown’s resistance quixotic, but the world is better for its efforts. Both the Thames Christian School and the student housing could have been exercises in spreadsheet architecture, the arrangement of the required number of units in an efficient way. That they are not is due to the architects’ belief that buildings can still have character and impact.
