2009 WINNING SCHEMES > Project Winners

 

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This development of 200 student study bedrooms, to be built on London’s Greenwich Road, is in the heart of the Ashburnham Triangle conservation area, next to the listed former Royal Kent Dispensary and opposite 2 Burgos Grove, one of the borough’s oldest surviving houses.

The building wraps a corner site with a continuous frontage, which gives the appearance of a single block but is three distinct ‘villas’ separated by stair cores that serve four storeys of ‘apartments’, with never more than three apartments per floor. Each apartment contains between five and eight study bedrooms of typically 12 m2, sharing a large kitchen diner. This principal space within is expressed in the facade with projecting windows, whereas study bedrooms have recessed windows. Other larger 15 m2 studios, intended to appeal to postgraduate students, are located mostly to the quieter southern corner of the layout.

The elevations use vertical bands of stonework where the three villas meet each other and have panels of brickwork picking up on the Georgian buildings either side, complemented by simple white render. The top store, which is set behind a parapet reflecting the Georgian neighbours, will be finished with a silvery untreated hardwood so that it has less presence and doesn’t dominate its 2-storey neighbours. The scheme promises to be a smart update on the best of the Georgians.

The layout of the scheme is designed to create as much amenity space as possible for students who, even in the Greenwich area with its spectacular parkland, will need space to break out from the intensity of their living accommodation - some 650 bedspaces per hectare.

The dominant feature of the outdoor space will be a mature London plane tree, which the shape and the depth of the L-plan block was designed to preserve and enjoy. Elevations to both the front and back deflect inwards towards their centres to allow existing trees to be maintained. The scheme will be topped with a green flat roof, a response which both tackles climate issues and conservation anxieties.

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