Kennington Park
- Client: Workspace Group
- Contacts: Anil Pallan, Charles Graham
The Kennington Park development comprises three new, contemporary buildings delivering 270,000 sqft of commercial space in the heart of The Oval for Workspace, a leading property company in London.
The scheme will provide new flexible business space and a newly landscaped amenity creating an integrated masterplan for the existing business park. The new workspace will comprise of light industrial, office and studio space with a key design principle being flexibility to respond to economic and market changes. The development will be focused on employment, improving the existing workspace and increasing the coherence of Kennington Park Business Centre as a whole.
The Client’s key development principles that formed their brief, has been placed on creating a new and attractive destination and place, rather than a working centre; a place to not only work but to also visit and enjoy.
Placemaking and well-being is truly at the heart of this new development, with sustainability at the forefront of the proposed design. The efficient use of natural ventilation and daylight to enhance the workplace targets BREEAM ‘Excellent’ and achieve WELL accreditation. A cohesive landscaping strategy which ties in with the industrial nature of the site, seeks to make new green, sustainable insertions into the existing predominantly hard landscape, creating new public green spaces for mixed recreational activities, breakout space and gardens, improving accessibility and connections throughout the business park.
The site’s historic industrial heritage has strongly influenced the design of the new buildings, their scale and proportion, ensuring that the new development comfortably sits in the existing context.
The historical use of the site as a timber yard and a motor-works factory, led us to develop complimentary building typologies reflecting the past. The storage of timber requires different thicknesses of timber to be stacked above one another on a grid shelving system. This concept has been simplified to create the main principles for one of the façade typologies, now reinterpreted as a slatted brick detail.
