Black Kite | Bureau de Change Architects

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Black Kite | Bureau de Change Architects

Information

  • Completion year: 2022
  • Gross Built up Area: 1000 sqm
  • Project Location: London
  • Country: United Kingdom
  • Collaborators: AW Spaces
  • Photo Credits: Gilbert McCarragher
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Excerpt: Bureau de Change has completed a creative studio for Black Kite, an independent visual effects and design studio in East London, curating a series of intersecting and carved-out cylinders. These configure a sequence of spaces with varying degrees of privacy, informed by the heritage of the site’s industrial past. Carefully curated furniture activates the space and creates a homely and comfortable atmosphere, placed among the cavities and the negative spaces between the volumes.

Project Description

[Text as submitted by architect] Bureau de Change has completed a creative studio for Black Kite, an independent visual effects and design studio in East London, curating a series of intersecting and carved-out cylinders. These configure a sequence of spaces with varying degrees of privacy, informed by the heritage of the site’s industrial past.

Black Kite | Bureau de Change Architects
© Gilbert McCarragher

The client’s brief called for a specific working environment, production, and visual effects suites isolated from external sources of light and sound. Bureau de Change responded to these conditions by devising a spatial strategy conceptualized from the site’s industrial past as an Engineers and Iron Foundry.

Black Kite | Bureau de Change Architects
© Gilbert McCarragher

Geometrical forms of traditional iron kilns reprise themselves in the proposal as a composition of dispersed intersecting circles mapped across the grid system established by the existing columns. Each volume contains a rectangular void, enclosing the production, editing, and color suites in a controlled private environment. Smaller cylinders intersect the private working space to create transitioning thresholds.

Co-founder and Director of Bureau de Change Katerina Dionysopoulou said, “We are proposing a scheme that extracts and interpolates volumes and motifs of traditional Victorian foundries and kilns to create a gradient of the introvert to extrovert spaces, seamlessly integrated through a bespoke layout and design language.”

Black Kite | Bureau de Change Architects
© Gilbert McCarragher

The undulating external surface forged from the intersections was excavated at intervals, creating carved-out spaces within the volumes. These cavities function as semiprivate breakout spaces, each correlating to their respective enclosed working suite, creating a duality of space within a singular volume, separated by a lone wall. The placement of each excavation allows for a natural transition between the enclosed working areas, semiprivate breakout cavities, and the central open-plan working space.

Black Kite | Bureau de Change Architects
© Gilbert McCarragher

Co-founder and Director of Bureau de Change Billy Mavropoulos explain, “Each of the volumes is clad in painted routed timber surfaces, informed by the vertical seams of traditional iron kilns. The cut-outs are finished in a rough clay plaster, juxtaposing the sharper articulation of the cylinders with warm cave-like textures, further adding to the journey of materials, textures, and colors in the space.”

Black Kite | Bureau de Change Architects
© Gilbert McCarragher
Black Kite | Bureau de Change Architects
© Gilbert McCarragher

On the ground floor, the open-plan lounge in the center links the reception in the front with the open-plan production desks in the back. The exposed production desks are undesignated, allowing easy access and flexible, impromptu usage. The kitchen inhabiting one of the cavities is cladded in stainless steel to reflect light and act as a distinct centerpiece of the room by the entrance, becoming the social core of the office. Handmade glazed ceramic tiles circumnavigate the curved recycled plastic countertop.

Black Kite | Bureau de Change Architects
© Gilbert McCarragher

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