offices
Bureau de Change Architects, 2022
46 Featherstone Street, EC1Y 8RN
Black Kite is an award-winning independent visual effects and design studio. Their new London studio - a riot of colour and geometry by Bureau de Change - supports a collective of creatives, offering a home from home.
Old Street
Old Street
55, 243
Bureau de Change’s concept for this specially designed work environment was shaped by the building’s industrial past as an engineers and iron foundry. The geometric forms of traditional iron kilns have inspired the design of large volumes clad in painted, routed timber, whose ridged surfaces reference the vertical seams of the kilns. Together these volumes create a composition of dispersed intersecting circles across the grid established by the building’s existing columns at basement and ground floor levels. Each volume contains a rectangular void, enclosing production, editing, and colour suites in a controlled private environment. Smaller cylinders intersect the private working spaces to create transitional thresholds.
Carved-out spaces within the volumes function as semi-private breakout spaces, each relating to its adjoining enclosed working suite, serving multiple functions within one volume separated by a single wall. The cut-outs are finished in a rough clay plaster, creating warm cave-like textures that contrast with the strong colours and forms of the cylinders. The placement of each of these cut-outs allows for a natural transition between private working areas, semi-private breakout sections, and a central open plan working space.
On the ground floor, a centrally-situated lounge links the reception in the front with the open plan production desks in the back. The desks are undesignated, allowing for ease of access and flexible, impromptu usage. A kitchen clad in stainless steel to reflect light and act as a centrepiece occupies one cylinder’s cut-out space, becoming the social core of the office. Deep blue handmade glazed ceramic tiles frame the kitchen’s curved recycled plastic countertop.
Carefully curated furniture placed among the cavities and the voids between the cylinders activates the spaces and creates a comfortable domestic atmosphere. The layout offers a mix of environments, giving users a choice of spaces according to their preferences and behaviours. The diverse spaces are connected seamlessly into one permeable plan, offering a sense of discovery through different layers.
Drop in
civic, art in the public realm, community/cultural, entertainment, mixed use, theatre, concert/performance space
Once one of the grandest civic buildings in London and now a great arts venue, the Grade II listed Shoreditch Town Hall boasts many spaces, from the Victorian grandeur of the Assembly Hall to the intimate warren of untouched basement rooms.
Caesar Augustus Long, 1866
