The brief for this building consisted of three main activities: offices, training room and counselling rooms. The challenge was to reconcile the conflicting demands of different types of accommodation - the public office and training room and the private counseling rooms - on an enclosed site within a conservation area.
A strategy of planning the accommodation around a courtyard divides the public and private accommodation, brings light into the heart of the confined site and makes a tranquil setting suitable for the private nature of counselling. Materials have been selected to provide tactile surfaces and textures, to establish a non-institutionalised environment that is comfortable and welcoming to its users.
Patel and Taylor’s handling of light has been carefully honed in its previous works. It is finely tested here with a building that must seamlessly merge the contradictory necessities of providing daylight for self contained rooms, combined with privacy and seclusion.
RIBA Journal
