We have been looking at Lina Bo Bardi’s work and wanted to dedicate a post to her community and cultural centre in Sao Paolo.

 Lina Bo Bardi (1914-92) was an influential Brazilian architect of Italian descent, and the architect behind the SESC Pompeia (1977-86) a dynamic adaptive reuse of a steel barrel factory in a traditionally working class area.

 The original factory, saved from demolition by the not-for-profit organisation SESC, was used informally for the 4 years before the redevelopment for community sports and children’s activities, and it was this occupation of the space that grounded Bardi’s direction throughout the project.

Sitting quietly amid the residential houses of Lansdowne Way, lies Stockwell Garage.  The unassuming exterior houses an incredible 120m long roof structure, with reinforced arches spanning 60 metres and enough parking spaces for 200 buses.

It was designed by Adie, Button and Partners in 1962 and at the time was the largest unsupported roof span in Europe.

We wanted to take a moment to draw attention to a humble low-rise depot building, and celebrate the beauty of its giant barrel vaults enjoyed by the sleeping buses of London only.

The Poulsom/Middlehurst team embarked on a research trip to the 2008 RIBA Stirling prize winning Accordia housing estate.

Designed by Fielden Clegg Bradley studios, Alison Brooks Architects and Macreanor Lavington; the development scheme consists of a masterplanned site comprising of 378 dwellings ranging from one bedroom flats to 5 bedroom houses. The designs of the houses and flats radically challenge and reflect on our changing aspirations and ways of living.

The scheme designed by the team of 3 architects shared a common language of using the same brick type, which was “selected to match closely to the traditional Cambridge Gault clay bricks”.  Using the same brick and similar materials, really made the whole project read as one coherent design with the expression of the architects coming instead from the form of their individual designs. 

We were recently introduced to great new product called the ‘Little Bishop’, a ceiling hook designed to hold cable hung pendant lights without any knots or fixings.

Designed and made by Antony Richards, it self locks and elegantly allows the cable and light to hang at different heights.

It is a product launched by Kickstarter and more details of the project can be found here.

We recently came across the former Pioneer Health Centre, known as the ‘Peckham Experiment’ - a pioneering health centre that was the brainchild of Dr Innes Pearse and Dr George Scott Williamson. Peckham’s rich mix of working families from artisans to tradesmen, civil servants to unskilled labourers was the reason that it was selected to be the locality for the project. The centre moved in 1935 to a custom-made building on St Mary’s Road by engineer and architect Owen Williams.

The centre was a pre-NHS and somewhat utopian construct to allow doctors to study human health rather than disease. The idea was to monitor the contributing factors to wellness in a community environment, and was among the first steps toward promoting the importance of prevention rather than cure.

Use of the centre faltered after the arrival of the National Health Service in 1948, and finally in 1950 the centre closed its doors to its public. It was converted into luxury flats in 2000.

Poulsom Middlehurst were delighted to exhibit as part of ARENA’s Re-imagining Rurality conference at the University of Westminster.

Our proposal took the vicinity of Queen’s Road Peckham as a test site, where we proposed an alternative development path for the area. It is somewhere whose identity is not static; as is the case with so many inner London settlements today; we wanted to understand better the drivers that bring about ‘urban’ or ‘rural’, and what defines the in-between.

Future Ex-Urban is a challenge to the current prototypical development path within London, where we propose an eventual inversion of intrinsic typological characters. Rural becomes the colonizer and urban the colonized; by repurposing existing urban infrastructure to enable rural networks and flows in the city, to produce a series of new contemporary ruralities.

This post is dedicated to Frei Otto who passed away last week (9th March) at the age of 89.  Frei Otto was an architect and structural engineer inspiring many in the profession with his radical ideas, research and work on flexible, temporary, lightweight and tensile structures in architecture. He is best know for his German pavilion at 1967 Montreal world expo and his 1972 Munich Olympic stadium.

His ideas and work are still highly relevant to contemporary architects and designers today; having heavily influenced the "high tech" architects of the 90's as well as projects such as his collaboration with Shigeru Ban for a temporary Japanese pavilion at the 2000 Hannover expo (where Otto's grid shell system is combined with Ban's recycled paper aesthetic) or more recently the proposed design for the new google HQ (designed by Thomas Heatherwick and Bjarke Ingels).

It was announced before his death that he would be awarded the 2015 Pritzker architecture prize, upon receiving the news he said, "I will use whatever time is left to me to keep doing what I have been doing, which is to help humanity."