The Chassis moves away from dedicated building use and designs in the level of flexibility that sees Victorian schools converted into offices or flats, or that sees warehouses converted into shops. This concept visualises large double-height spaces that are leased by volume, rather than by floor area, allowing much more flexibility in how people use the space
Project Details
Collective Team
The Chassis explorations for Canary Wharf has led to some unique design proposals that enable a variety of spatial activities, a 3 dimensional adaptability and flexible leasing by volume. This is your space to inhabit and sculpt for your needs and culture. To achieve this the spaces are set into an agile building chassis, a 100 year frame, with elastic adjacencies that can accommodate work / learn / live / play combinations or future changes of use.
Rather than traditional 2D measuring systems that seem to focus on your shoes, space can be valued by volume, cubic metres or cubic feet, refocusing completely on people and the space around them that includes air, light, temperature, movement, acoustics, and views for their overall wellbeing.
This has been made even more essential through the pandemic and our needs for healthy spaces to live and work. Shared and debated with influencers and practitioners, the propositions with their new opportunities and challenges have been welcomed by funders, developers, tenants, agents and construction specialists
This R+D study and project design was set up to attract the technology and digital industries, exploring the ways these companies like and need to work.
The structural chassis creates double height volumes for churn in three dimensions; walls and floors can be changed to suit digitally transforming teams and organisations.
There are multiple environmental inclusions enabled by the design including vertical farming, passive energy tempering, fresh air openings, natural lighting optimisation, thermal mass temperature management, recycled material use, well-being plant and biophilic integration and plug and play services.
A robust base structure means that a wide variety of types of accommodation – from offices and schools, to flats and hotels – can be combined in the same building, built above a large, civic-scaled ground floor volume – derived from the traditional atrium – a space for working, shopping, eating and socialising imagined with an ambition and vision that will match the ways in which our working and social lives are transforming.
Our design work has culminated in the creation of a new variety of workplace settings that are very much people focused, more typical of education models, designing, measuring and valuing the whole volume people actually occupy, the cubic metres of healthy air and light around them, rather than square metre metrics which are more focused on our shoes, often the traditional workplace or factory like office model.
The concept is simple and agile, being a structural and services chassis composed as a tower, mid-rise or low-rise design, and either as a new build or inside an existing form
Observing current occupier and technology changes, our R+D has analysed the market and proposes a flexible and linked variety of work settings from a sofa in a social/working reception lounge, to a series of quiet spaces and onto to a fully adaptable double height volumes with tenant freedom to change intermediate floors as well as walls, a range that enables a business to expand and contract all in one building.
It could further accommodate co-living or hotel operators, learning organisations, and leisure activities, either co-habiting for a multi-use experience maximising the value of a land plot, or changing over time from one to the other
The network of spaces in our design understands and enables the occupier’s activities, productivity and wellbeing for an inspiring daily experience. Attraction and retention of the best global talent is being called a war and their choice of a workplace such as this is critical to a business’s success, therefore exciting many traditional workplace organisations as well as creative industries.
The designs are being promoted by leading experts as innovative and motivational for all workplace companies to recognise this healthy evolution in occupier wellbeing and desires, and have gained further support and input from international developers, agents, specialists, workplace providers and prime global tenants.
Ground floor lounge and lobby
Upper level
