Building Office

Urban Room

Tower Hill, London

2009

We've all experienced the Public Square.

How about exploring the potentials of the Public Cube?

In the Urban Room project, our client is a hotel that would like to create relatively cheap short term accommodation in central London. The building will be built over the Tower Hill Station.

The site is actively used for cross walking between Fenchurch Street Station and famous Tower Bridge

and Tower of London. Although it's known as a touristic destination, during the working hours the site still serves for the business people.

On the left, you can see the different users like the London Underground user, hotel guest and the visitor in the same frame sharing the same plot in the plan but using the space completely different in the section.

Three tubes of uses intersects and forms this "stone" like hotel building in the most historical and famouse site of London.

It was very important in this project to create a frame - an edge for visitors, shop owners, hotel management to accommodate, allowing them to change and give characteristics to it in time. This is the reason behind the skin being uniform and pretty simple. In this project, the architect's role is defining interesting and beautiful spaces with programme suggesting light and material qualities.

The aim is to create an almost puzzle like tension between the user and the designer.

In this game, while architect dreams a space to be used in certain ways, he never limits the creativity of the user and does not underestimate the instincts of the building's user. To do this, more than one circulation options are provided, openings like windows, doors are not built solid, a wall is a frame instead of a solid concrete boundary.

partners in charge:

Aras Burak, Aris Kozmidis

techical advisor:

Scobie Alvis

Urban Room

Mahalle V / H

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Building Office was founded in 2006 and the Reading Office was founded in 2009 in London.

BO is interested both in the act of building and the phenomenon of building in every scale while RO focuses on the self criticism and communication of the work produced in the office with the outside world.

Reading Office also acts as a source for collecting, broadcasting information about interesting buildings all around the world while Building Office focuses only on the production of buildings.

Every year starting in mid-august, we recruit a team of building designers, structural and computer engineers for Building Office. We are interested in hiring critics, journalists, movie makers and graphic designers for the Reading Office.