Mainyard Garden Studios, East London

Affordable music studios and creative workspace

Background

The e-gg team was asked to design a demountable courtyard garden pavilion to provide affordable music studios and office spaces for a co-working location in East London. The challenging backyard site is full of established and protected trees in a conservation area.

The creative economy plays a vital role in the growth of a thriving and diverse community here, with small and micro-scale creative businesses making a significant contribution to this. Much of the success of these companies and individuals is dependent upon rates and tenancy agreements that are appropriately priced, flexible and supportive of their efforts.

The proposed garden studios provide further dedicated creative workspace, including specialist studios for music production.

Client:
Mainyard Studios
Status
Proposal
Approach

We developed the design for the pavilion in line with circular economy and biophilic design principles, as summarised in The Practice of Biophilic Design, Kellert & Calabrese (2015):

  1. Biophilic design requires repeated and sustained engagement with nature.
  2. Biophilic design focuses on human adaptations to the natural world that over evolutionary time have advanced people’s health, fitness and wellbeing.
  3. Biophilic design encourages an emotional attachment to particular settings and places.
  4. Biophilic design promotes positive interactions between people and nature that encourage an expanded sense of relationship and responsibility for the human and natural communities.
  5. Biophilic design encourages mutual reinforcing, interconnected, and integrated architectural solutions
Outcome

Sitting among the trees, the studios are conceived as a contemporary reimagining of the pavilions of nineteenth-century villa and pleasure gardens. They are set on a raised deck with minimal contact with the ground to prevent damage to the existing mature trees on site.

Rooms are arranged around a central external courtyard, with walls creating visual connections between the different spaces. Rooflights bring natural light to the centre of the spaces while offering glimpses of the tree canopy above. Perimeter walls have been designed to limit sound transfer and overlooking, while opening windows in the office spaces enable natural cross-ventilation.

The rooms are a combination of individual offices, specialist music studio spaces and a kitchenette area that can serve as a space for breakout and social gathering. The courtyard can further support informal working when the weather allows.

Each office and studio effectively has its own front door to help small or micro organisations establish a sense of identity. Individual workspace sizes are kept small and affordable, with the proposed construction allowing partitions to be moved or removed if different sizes of space are required.

All workspaces sit beneath an extensive green roof, punctuated with rooflights, that reinforces local biodiversity, provides visual amenity to the offices that overlook it, and further deadens sound.

The façade takes cues from the Modernist aesthetic of the main building. By elegantly deploying low-cost panellised materials, the scheme offers high-quality contemporary design with a low carbon footprint. Sculpted to sit harmoniously within the landscape, the designs offer maximum floorspace without compromising the integrity of these natural assets.