Juergen Teller Studio, London

Project team

Client:Juergen Teller

Architect:6a Architects

Structural Engineer:Price & Myers

Project Manager/QS:AECOM

M&E Engineer:Max Fordham LLP

Main Contractor:Harris Calnan Construction

Date of completion:2016

Facts

Awards: RIBA Stirling Prize Nominated

London studio for artist and photographer Juergen Teller is in texture, form and finish, as rich as an old master.

Behind the front facade of the studio is the first of three buildings, which contains offices. Moving deeper into the site, this is connected by a garden to the main studio – a largely open space dominated by two slender staircases rising to storage rooms that appear to hang from the ceiling. This in turn leads via another garden to the third building, which houses meeting rooms, offices and a library.

With the exception of the staircases, all the in-situ concrete above ground is self-compacting. While this presented a challenge to the contractor, which had not worked with the material before, it also had a number of benefits, as Carlos Sanchez of London-based 6a Architects explains. “We chose self-compacting concrete because there was a high level of complexity in some of the pours – especially in the concrete canopies that house the roller shutters to the doors and windows.” These contain a lot of congested reinforcement, which would have made it difficult to eliminate air by the normal use of vibrating pokers, he adds, and the formwork also had top shutters under which it would have been easy for air to become trapped. “Self-compacting concrete flows more easily around the reinforcement and so reduces the risk of air bubbles without the need for pokers.”

The blockwork walls are load-bearing, supporting the in-situ beams and slabs that span the 7.5m width of the site and support the upper floors. “But we needed to keep the blockwork clean and protected from the pours for the slabs. To do this we used the fact that there are actually walls of grey concrete blocks behind the white ones. These were built first and the forms for the slabs were supported off them togetherwith supplementary props.”

Unlike the exterior, the shuttering for the interior in-situ concrete was made from standard-sized, paper-lined MDO boards. “This gives us the matt, non-shiny finish which we wanted as the interior was already quite busy with the blockwork,” says Sanchez. The finish is particularly attractive on the vertical faces, such as those on the store rooms’lateral walls above the studio, where the more liquid nature of the self-compacting concrete has created faint tide lines. “The layering gives you an idea about how it has been poured, and like the rest of the in-situ concrete we have left it just as it was struck.”

The patterns made by the self-compacting concrete and the tile-like white blockwork are illuminated by the windows in the saw-tooth roof, the light filtered through the 100mm concrete ribs of the roof beams. The ribs provide a spatial rhythm running the length of all three buildings, ensuring a both a practical and aesthetically consistent distribution of natural light.With so much exposed concrete, the building, almost incidentally, benefits from having a large exposed thermal mass, able to keep the building cool in summer, while retaining heat in winter. “We have not gone for an environmental rating, but the windows are triple-glazed, it is very airtight, and with the thermal mass effect you could almost heat it with candles.”

The two gardens that separate the buildings also feature concrete. Some of this is the remains of the frame from the building that was demolished to create the site. The effect is of an ancient ruin, only the bones of which are left. On the ground, a thin layer of concrete has been poured and then smashed, allowing plants to seed in the cracks. Maintaining the concrete theme in the gardens helps to unite the interior and exterior spaces, and reinforces the transparent and connected feel that 6a has been at pains to achieve.

Featured in CQ Spring 2017 (pg 4)