The house at 168 Upper Street is a corner "pavilion" of a large complex in the form of the English Baroque, which was built in the late 19th century. Despite the fact that the complex consisted of a series of townhouses intended for housing and shops on the ground floor, it received a clear symmetrical composition. Therefore, when, during the bombing during the Second World War, its corner was badly destroyed, and later demolished, its absence was very noticeable.
It is only now that the customer, a retailer of furniture and design objects Aria, bought the site in 2012 and held a competition for the best version of the project, to restore the symmetry. As a result, a three-apartment building with an Aria store on the ground floor was built according to the design of Amin Takhi's bureau.
The architects did not want to copy the past word for word or develop the language of "neoclassicism". However, given the position of the site, it was impossible not to respond to its role in the quarter. Experiments prompted a way out
Edouard François in Paris and Diener & Diener in Berlin, as well as a number of works of modern art, built on the combination of a volume copy of the lost structure with modern material, a different arrangement of window openings, etc.
House number 168 was recreated from historical photographs and from its mirror counterpart - the "pavilion" from the opposite corner. His three-dimensional model became the basis for 450 m2 of polystyrene formwork. The material is concrete, which matches the color of the brick facades of the preserved part of the complex, but does not merge with them. However, the authors of the project were not interested in exact technical copying, but in the concept of historical memory, with its errors and gaps. Therefore, they not only did not correct the emerging problems, but even welcomed them. The source of inaccuracies was both robots hanging during the manufacture of the formwork, and workers who confused the location of its panels.
The resulting concrete shell, half a meter thick, also includes the interior surface of the walls: from the inside, an ornament reminiscent of historical wallpaper is applied to it. Interfloor floors are made of cross-laminated timber. The arrangement of the windows corresponds to the new, rather than the historical, layout, so they immediately mark the house in the urban space as a work of modern architecture. The total construction area is 545 m2, the budget is 1.8 million pounds.
