Architectural Portfolio 2014

ARCHITECTURAL PORTFOLIO

BEN HANSEN Architect (BSc M.Arch ARB)[email protected]

+44 (0)79 1415 0254benhansen87.wordpress.com

Ben Hansen [email protected] 0044 (0)79 1415 02542

ROZ BARR ARCHITECTS................................................................................................4Clerkenwell, London

POLLARD THOMAS EDWARDS......................................................................................6Islington, London

WELSH SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE........................................................................11Master of Architecture (M.Arch)Cardiff University, Wales

POLLARD THOMAS EDWARDS....................................................................................16Islington, London

WELSH SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE........................................................................18Bachelor of Science in Architectural Studies (B.Sc)Cardiff University, Wales

Ben Hansen [email protected] 0044 (0)79 1415 0254 3

20 LOWER MARSH STREETRoz Barr Architects - 2014Residential Rooftop ExtensionConcept Design / Planning

10 & 11 UPPER WIMPOLE STREETRoz Barr Architects - 2014Residential Conversion / Listed BuildingPlanning / Tender / Construction

CONSTRUCTIVE DECONSTRUCTIONDissertation: Cardiff University - 2011 M.Arch Master of Architecture

RE-APPROPRIATING THE RUIN Degree Project: Cardiff University - 2009BSc Hons in Architectural Studies

WALLIS ROADPollard Thomas Edwards Architects - 2013ResidentialPre-Planning

MARKET ROADPollard Thomas Edwards Architects - 2011Residential / Social HousingProduction Information / Construction

PACKINGTON ESTATEPollard Thomas Edwards Architects - 2010Social Housing / Estate Regeneration / MasterplanningProduction Information / Construction

ST LUKES MUSWELL HILLPollard Thomas Edwards Architects - 2013Masterplanning / Residential / Listed BuildingPlanning / Tender

THE PLUG-AND-PLAY CITYThesis Project: Cardiff University - 2011M.Arch Master of Architecture

DEGREES OF PERMANENCEPrimer Project: Cardiff University - 2010M.Arch Master of Architecture

DOVER COURT ESTATEPollard Thomas Edwards Architects - 2014Social Housing / Estate Regeneration / MasterplanningFeasibility / Consultation / Planning

AYLESBURY ESTATEPollard Thomas Edwards Architects - 2013Social Housing / Estate Regeneration / MasterplanningPlanning / Tender

BRIXTON TOWN HALL AND ENTERPRISE CENTREPollard Thomas Edwards Architects - 2013Listed Building / Residential / Council OfficesCompetition


20 LOWER MARSH STREETLambeth, London

Residential / Rooftop ExtensionConcept Design & Planning

20 Lower Marsh Street is a three storey Georgian townhouse located just south of Waterloo Station in the Lower Marsh Conservation Area. The project comprises a rooftop extension housing a bedroom, WC, shower and two roof terraces.

I worked on this scheme as Project Architect for three months from concept design through to submission of the planning application.

The design is for a folded metal ‘tent’ structure with large central roof light, clad internally in exposed plywood with self-supporting plywood stair to provide access from below.


NO. 10 & 11 UPPER WIMPOLE STREETWestminster, London

Residential / Medical / Historical Building / Conversion£825,000 (No. 10 only)Planning and Tender

10 and 11 Upper Wimpole Street are two five-storey listed Georgian townhouses in Marylebone, London.

The project at No. 10 involved the replanning and refurbishment of the ground and first floor apartments, refurbishment of the staircase and entrance hallway and a shell and core fit out to the lower ground floor medical offices. I worked on the job as project architect for five months to submit a revised planning application, produce information for tender and oversee mobilisation and the commencement of work on site. I was also involved in obtaining sign-off on outstanding planning and building control conditions.

For the upper floors of No.10 and No.11 we proposed to break through the party wall and create two large, 3 bed, lateral apartments. I worked on this element of the project for a further month and submitted drawings for planning.

DOUGHTY MEWSCamden, London

Residential ConversionDesign and Access Statement

Doughty Mews is a street of old stables and servants quarters built to serve the grand houses behind. The houses are single aspect and the plan depth is extremely shallow, down to just 3m in places.

I worked on this project for one month replanning the internal layouts and designing new doors and windows to allow more light into the interior.


WALLIS ROADHackney, London

Residential / Social Housing / CommercialPre-Planning

Wallis Road is a large mixed use development in North-East London comprising a mix of private sale and social rent units with retail units on the ground floor.

I worked on the project for two months during early pre-planning discussions with the local authority. The images above explore options for converting an existing metal workshop on a prominent corner of the site and adding a faceted two storey metal-clad extension.


DOVER COURT ESTATEIslington, London

Social Housing / Estate Regeneration / MasterplanningFeasibility / Consultation / Planning£11m

Dover Court is a 1960’s council estate in Islington, London. The project brief was to identify opportunities to improve the existing urban fabric and open spaces and to identify infill opportunities for new housing.

I worked on the scheme for 6 months through detailed design up to planning. I also worked on a number of public consultations where we discussed the proposals with local residents and other stakeholders.

MERCATOR ROADLewisham, London

Social HousingPlanning£880k

Planning submission for 6 council houses in Lewisham, south London.

I worked as lead designer for two months with a Part I Assistant through the design development and up to a full planning submission.


AYLESBURY ESTATESouthwark, London

Social Housing / Estate Regeneration / MasterplanningPlanning / Tender£28.5m

The Aylesbury Estate in Elephant and Castle, London, is a large 1960’s estate, currently undergoing a major regeneration under the Aylesbury Area Action Plan.

Phase 2 Harvard Gardens involves the demolition of existing blocks to be replaced with a finer urban grain of brick townhouses, mews houses, apartments and maisonettes ranging from 3 to 10 storeys.

I joined the Aylesbury team following a successful competition submission and worked on the project for 6 months through a comprehensive redesign up to planning.


ST LUKES MUSWELL HILLHaringey, London

Masterplanning / Residential / Third Age Housing / Co-housing / Historical BuildingsPlanning / Tender £38.8m

St Lukes Muswell Hill is a project to redevelop a former hospital in Muswell Hill, North London to provide 173 new homes. These will be a mixture of private apartments, 3rd age housing for the over 55’s, maisonettes, family houses and a co-housing scheme to the west of the site.

I worked on this project for 6 months from the late concept design stages through planning and detail design and was involved in producing information for tender. I was also the point of contact for a number of external consultants including the landscape architects, 3D visualisation specialists and physical model makers.


BRIXTON TOWN HALL AND ENTERPRISE CENTRELambeth, London

Historic Building / Residential / Council OfficesCompetition

Brixton Town Hall was a competition submission in collaboration with Stanton Williams to redevelop and extend the historic Lambeth Council Offices in addition to providing residential accommodation on a number of smaller satellite sites.

I worked as a member of the competition team for three months. My primary role was 3D modelling, including co-ordination with the Stanton Williams team. I also designed one of the residential satellite sites comprising outline proposals for 9 residential units.

MARKET ROADIslington, London

Residential / CommercialConstruction information / Construction£24m

Market Road is a large mixed-use development comprising 164 residential units and 354sqm of retail space. The brownfield site spans a busy London Underground railway line in Islington. Building across the tunnel required a complex structural solution with heavier concrete frame structures situated on the adjacent banks and a lightweight steel construction running across the tracks. The bridging structure is formed by a storey deep concrete box beam structure incorporating underground car parking. The building is acoustically lined and floats isolated from its foundations on an array of heavy duty shock absorbers to reduce vibrations from passing trains.

I worked on this project for six months preparing construction detail packages and responding to contractor RFI’s.

ARK JOHN KEATS PRIMARY & SECONDARY SCHOOLEnfield, London

Education /Renovation / MasterplanningCompetition / Concept Design£15m

A competition to transform a semi-derelict school campus into a new Academy School, including elements of demolition, renovation and limited new-build.

I worked on this project for three months, primarily designing the form, massing and elevational treatment of the new-build elements and preparing 3D visuals for the competition submission.


THE PLUG-AND-PLAY CITYUCL Research Centre for the Emerging SciencesThesis Project: Cardiff UniversityM.Arch Master of Architecture

The project is a UCL research centre for emerging sciences situated in Camden, London. The brief requires a variety of high quality, highly serviced laboratory spaces capable of quick and frequent adaptation to respond to the latest technological advances. The building must also respond to the human requirement for place and identity by providing quality spaces capable of supporting and encouraging communication and cross-fertilisation between research disciplines. The thesis attempts to resolve the apparent contradiction between the flexible but essentially place-less functionality of an ‘Archigram’ plug-in system and the civic need for place and accumulated memory within the city.

The building consists of a heavy, permanent, concrete plinth embedded in the site. This servant zone responds to the existing urban fabric and contains the service spine and circulation as well as workshops, support spaces and static accommodation.

The flexible laboratory spaces above consist of lightweight steel frame pavilions. The volumetric pods are pre-fabricated, transported to site and assembled before being craned into place and connected to the infrastructural network. This ‘plug-and-play’ system optimises the quality of the factory-finished laboratory units, minimises disruption and down-time for the facility and allows for rapid expansion, contraction and modification as required.

While the laboratory spaces are designed to be transient and short-term, the polyvalent plinth element is designed to outlast the functional life of the building, supporting evolving functions while retaining a continuous accumulated memory of inhabitation embedded within the urban fabric.

Commendation, published in ‘Best of the Student Shows 2011’ Blueprint Magazine, September 2011 (UK)


The project is built across an open railway cutting and the temporary lab modules are designed to be carried by either truck or train, allowing for easy delivery to the central London location. A folding crane is housed permanently on-site allowing for fast and easy assembly, modification and removal of modules, with minimum disruption to the ongoing operation of the facility.

The plug-and-play infrastructural plinth is connected to the local infrastructure grid to provide essential services and telecommunications. Power is supplied via deep geothermal bores that tap into the geothermal heat differential many kilometres below the city to generate large quantities of cheap, sustainable energy. This energy supply creates a surplus that can be exploited for future growth or sold back to the national grid as an additional income stream. The geothermal bore acts as the anchor point and supply centre for the departmental nodes, which in turn are linked together by strings of ancillary laboratory and research spaces.

Communication between different scientific disciplines is an important element of the brief, and a particular emphasis has been placed on creating a variety of shared spaces to foster opportunities for chance encounters and collaboration. The accommodation is arranged around a shared courtyard space with a single primary entrance, and circulation routes follow the infrastructural spine and are shared by staff from all departments. A variety of informal breakout spaces open off this circulation route and from departmental stair cores. There is a cafe located to the centre of the plan opening out onto the shared courtyard, and each departmental core has a small planted roof garden.

While the heavy plinth elements are bedded into the site, the lighter more transient elements float on an array of shock absorbent bearings. These isolate the laboratory modules from the primary structure and protect sensitive scientific equipment from vibrations from traffic or passing trains.



CONSTRUCTIVE DECONSTRUCTIONA CREATIVE RESPONSE TO THE SHRINKING CITYDissertation: Cardiff UniversityM.Arch Master of Architecture

Abstract:

Our cities are shrinking. Modern, highly developed cities around the world are facing large-scale population losses and concurrent reductions in urban density, in a process that challenges the hegemony of the capitalist growth model.

Although shrinkage is not a new phenomenon, the two hundred years of rapid growth in western cities following the industrial revolution, has led to the situation where ‘growth has become an expectation’.

This dissertation argues that population stability, and even controlled shrinkage should be viewed alongside growth as legitimate phases in a city’s evolution. Urban shrinkage must first be recognised and accepted before we can begin to approach the population loss and urban perforation in a constructive way.

Can urban shrinkage be harnessed to achieve an improvement in urban living conditions despite continuing population loss?

Globally 450 cities with populations over 100,000 have lost at least 10% of their population since the 1950s. One in four shrunk between 1990 and 2000, with this shrinkage primarily concentrated in Eastern Europe and former industrial cities across Europe, Japan and the American Rust Belt.

This process of massive population loss and the resultant restructuring of the urban fabric has received surprisingly little attention in contemporary architectural and planning discourse. The predominant response from municipal authorities is outright denial, coupled with optimistic growth strategies that fail to recognise the reality of the situation. Shrinkage is viewed as symptomatic of failure.

However the Earth is a finite system, and the indefinite growth espoused and striven for by politicians and planners is an inherently unsustainable concept. Uneven development is in the very nature of capitalism and pressures of competition are compounded by demographic realities. The majority of highly developed post-industrial countries are experiencing a decline in population, with the EU predicted to lose almost 20% of its working age population by 2050.

Should shrinkage therefore be viewed as a failure of planning and economic policies, or rather, as a natural and entirely predictable part of the life cycle and maturation of the contemporary city?

If we accept the premise that in certain regions shrinkage is unavoidable, the question then, is how to harness this shrinkage in a constructive manner. Planning policies with a tropism towards growth exacerbate problems of shrinkage by failing to engage with the issues on the ground, squandering limited resources while also missing the unique opportunities offered by a shrinking, perforated city fabric.

Planners and urban policy makers have begun to reverse this mentality in certain parts of the world, notably in cities in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) states in Eastern Germany, but this constructive response to the phenomenon is still an exception rather than the norm. The lessons learned in cities such as Leipzig have immediate relevance to other declining post-industrial urban areas, both in Britain and internationally. Sharing and communicating these ideas is of paramount importance if we are to overcome the traditional combative mind-set and instead work to harness shrinkage as a tool for improving urban quality of life.


‘PLACE’ AND EMBEDDED MEMORYPrimer Project: Cardiff UniversityM.Arch Master of Architecture

My Primer Project examined the urban fabric as a medium for information storage. Using the welsh town of Llanelli as a test-subject, the primer was an exploration of the resilience of memory embedded in the binary figure-ground and the importance of urban mnemonics in relation to place and identity.

As a starting point I explored the theory of place and place-making, and in particular the idea of embedded memory; memory stored as information encoded in the physical fabric of the city. I was interested in how the accumulation and aggregation of temporal remnants can have a crucial role in establishing identity.

I applied this research to Llanelli, a small post-industrial town that has suffered from catastrophic industrial collapse and is characterised by a disrupted, perforated city fabric. My research focused on the characteristics of evolved urban forms and how fragments of this fabric, stripped of context and of their original raison d’etre can still provide an urban narrative and perform an essential function in defining place and identity.


PACKINGTON ESTATEIslington, London

Residential / Commercial / CommunityConstruction£130m (£23m for Phase 2)

Packington Estate is a large 1960’s council estate on Regents Canal in north London. The proposals included 791 mixed tenure units, a community centre, CHP plant and commercial units all set within a newly landscaped network of streets and squares. The project is part financed by new private sale units, which help to cross-subsidise the social housing provision.

The project goals are to increase density across the estate, improve the quality of the accommodation and rationalise the green spaces into a more coherent and usable form, while also reintegrating the estate into the surrounding urban faric.

The estate will remain fully inhabited throughout construction and the development is phased to allow for resdents to be decanted as the build progresses. This approach minimises disruption and ensures tht each resident only has to move once.

The proposals are in a simple palette of traditional materials; London stock brick, white render and grey zinc, with slim frame double glazed windows to match. Elevational treatments are simple and elegant to blend with the surrounding Victorian townscape.

I worked with the Packington team as a Junior Assitant for nine months through practical completion of Phase 1 and detail design and construction of Phase 2.


GREY COURT SECONDARY SCHOOLRichmond, London

EducationConcept Design£1.4m

Extension to an existing secondary school in Richmond to provide new Design and Technology and AEN (Additional Educational Needs) classrooms and to remodel and extend the library.

During the design process I took part in several architectural workshops with the students to generate ideas and discuss our proposals.

I worked as assistant to the Project Architect for 6 weeks through concept development.


RE-APPROPRIATING THE RUINMaternity Unit And Respite Care For The Elderly, Murano, VeniceDegree Project: Cardiff UniversityB.Sc in Architectural Studies

Murano is a small island situated in the Laguna Veneto in the north-east of Italy. The island is a 40 minute boat ride from Venice to the south.

The brief was to take a large, vacant industrial site in the heart of the old-city and reconfigure it to provide maternity and respite care facilities and tackle the physical and spiritual issues presented by the very first and last stages of life.

The site is located right in the heart of Murano in a prominent position on the Grand Canal and presented a range of challenges, both in terms of scale and complexity as well as questioning how to respond to the powerful character of the local urban fabric. The existing structures form a massive industrial island within the fine medieval tissue consisting of two vast, derelict warehouses and an assortment of smaller factories, offices and storerooms.

The scale of the site necessitated planning on an urban scale, and my initial design moves involved breaking up the perimeter and re-establishing routes to knit the site back into the urban fabric. The warehouse buildings tower over the neighbourhood and provide and iconic identity to the local area. Maintaining and re-appropriating them became a crucial part of my intervention.

At the building scale I developed a number of driving concepts to help tie the many disparate aspects of the site and brief together into a coherent whole. There is a clear definition of zones of privacy, gradated to integrate the centre with the life of the city while maintaining the necessary privacy for the intimate moments. I also adopted a clear, well defined tectonic strategy. New accommodation is housed in simple linear buildings made from reclaimed brick while key spaces such as the chapel and swimming pool are housed in soaring weathered steel shells built using ship building techniques, echoing the importance of the sea to this community. This strategy is designed to improve legibility and way-finding across the site, with the warehouse walls and steel shells acting as points of orientation. The plinth is used as an organisational element housing ancillary and servant spaces and the existing warehouse walls were retained and repaired but left open to the elements, acting as a second skin for the accommodation within.


The project is designed with communal support at its core. Both maternity and respite accommodation are arranged around calm central courtyards cocooned from the outside world and with all necessary support close at hand. The maternity unit is short stay and the emphasis is on providing a tranquil environment with water and light used to create restful spaces. By contrast the respite care unit is designed to both provide a sanctuary and to combat loneliness and isolation. There are generous communal kitchen facilities where family members can come to cook and share a meal, sensory gardens open to the patients and the public alike, and safe spaces to sit and watch the world go by.

BEN HANSEN Architect (BSc M.Arch ARB)[email protected]

+44 (0)79 1415 0254benhansen87.wordpress.com

Architectural Portfolio 2014

Documents

walespollard thomas

londonpollard thomas

sccardiff university

archcardiff university

project architect

residential conversion

lower marsh streetlambeth

permanenceprimer project