We are short-listed for the Hackney City Farm Competition. Our glass-house with a construction budget of £1900 is clad with reclaimed timber windows, houses a suspended rainwater collection bladder and community vegetable storage facility. The front of the building opens up during the day to give access to the sapling sales area.
The Branding Lab sets up an inter-disciplinary forum which brings together design students and recent graduates with shopowners from High Road Leyton. Waltham Forest Council has made generous funds available to enhance the prospects for independent retailers whilst giving students and graduates an opportunity to see their designs realised in real life, working alongside the High Road Leyton design team at Jan Kattein Architects, specialist contractors and local stakeholders. A design competition intended to identify some of the most aspirational young designers is being launched today at www.brandinglab.co.uk.
Our town-centre regeneration project for Green Lanes was awarded £1,778,506 from Mayor Boris Johnson’s Outer London Fund earlier this week. The ambitious design proposal for a series of micro squares, shop front improvements and the Harringay Gateway was selected from 80 submissions in a competitive bid. The project will receive direct funding from Design for London. It will set an aspirational precedent for the community and begin to secure the wider regeneration of the area. See the Green Lanes project page for more details.
Jan Kattein & David Garcia’s Design Unit are exhibiting their work at the Bartlett School of Architecture Gallery. In November 2012 Unit 3 went on an expedition to the Pyrenees, a mountain range, 150 million years old, that has weathered a radical human transformation during the last 50. Dams and industries are re-forming the landscape to feed the ever-hungry metropolises in the lowlands. Traditional herding and rural activities are disappearing, abandoning villages and farmsteads over night to contest their own fate against the slow forces of weather, erosion and decay. All the while, extreme sports and high mountain tourism are festering. Along this mountainous border, out of sight from authority and on the edge of society, a new ecology is taking hold. In tune with the local environment and responsive to the needs of the group, a movement has established itself based on the principles of fair dealing and self-organisation. Abandoned ruins, reclaimed, transform into smallholdings; micro-industries rely on the mutual exchange of goods and services ensuring self-sufficiency. Communal activities generate the local infrastructure necessary for a civilized society while the internet provides a platform for global solidarity and skills exchange. 14 portable shelters made in the Bartlett workshop have served as tools for the study the climatic-, social-, geological- and ecological parameters of the site and also provided overnight accommodation during the expedition. The exhibition shows work by Ginny Chau, Melanie Cheng, Nicolas Chung, Deniz Varol, Max Friedlander, Karen Hu, Yolanda Heng In Leung, Martyna Marciniak, Isabel Ogden, Andra Tuna, Chengqi Wan, Henrietta Watkins, Vivian Wong, Tracey Xiao.
Our sub-terrain extension on Quarrendon Street in Fulham was given planning permission. We will now progress with detailed design and works on site will start in the spring 2012.
Phase 2 of the High Road Leyton Shop Fronts Improvement Scheme is now complete. Works included the installation of 6 new shop fronts and the refurbishment of 9 buildings across a complete terrace at the heart of the High Road. Works to the opposite terrace continue on site and are due for completion in the new year.
The first of our residential extensions for Camden Council has just been completed on site. The building in Reapers Close offers a bedroom apiece across two adjacent properties. Large colourful window openings have been used to increase the sense of light and space while a grass roof ensures that no green space is lost.
Jan Kattein Architects have submitted a bid for Harringay Green Lanes on behalf of the Harringay Traders Association and the London Borough of Haringey to the Outer London Fund – Round 2. The proposal is part of an ambitious plan to undertake lasting improvement works across all scales of the public realm. Funding allocation to be announced at the end of November. See the Green Lanes project page for more details.
Jan Kattein Architects are advising Haringey council and the Harringay Trader’s Association on their £2 million high street improvement project for Green Lanes. The project comprises interactive lighting displays, urban realm improvements and works to 50 shops.
We have been working with Camden Council’s overcrowding team for six years to devise a strategy that would help overcrowded families by adapting or extending their homes. Three micro-extensions with green roofs that are carefully designed to suit their dense urban context are progressing on site in various parts of the borough. Once complete, the small buildings will provide additional living space to allow overcrowded families to remain in their existing home. Sustainability is achieved by careful adaptation and extension rather than demolition and re-building.
