Calthorpe Apartments

The Calthorpe Apartment project is situated on prominent Gray’s Inn Road in Bloomsbury, London where the Calthorpe Community Center is located.  The center serves various needs of the public by providing educational opportunities, a sports court, gardens, and a café.  The goal of the project was to enhance this vibrant neighborhood center, by adding residences that would serve young designers and expanding the Calthorpe center with permanent buildings.  Due to these uses the building developed a civic character to give presence to the Calthorpe Center.  In order to respond to the site conditions, the building’s presence was illustrated with both the character and by shaping the street the street by having a large mass to the edge of the Gray’s Inn Road property line.  The rear façade responds to the community garden it is located within by having the program broken up into smaller structures whose character is drawn from Arts and Crafts tradition.  The base of the building serves as shopfronts for artists who would live above them, while the following floors are small apartments for young architects.  The upper-most floor is the studio space, where each architect would receive their own bay that would be their office for his or her new firm.  The tectonics of the structure were studied in-depth with precedent research as well as with the counting of brick, detailing of windows, and designing of wall sections, which built on the London building tradition.