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Substation Utility Building
Another fine project completed early in the London Olympics program is
the Substation Utility Building for London’s Olympic Park by Glasgow
Architects NORD Architects, winner of the prestigious RIBA Awards for
Architectural Excellence.
In 2007 NORD were appointed to work with the Olympic Delivery Authority
to develop a strong contextual approach to a key utility building within the
Olympic Park.The building, completed in January 2010, is not designed for
an event in its own right but as one of a number of buildings that form the
fabric of the Olympic site, having permanance weight and dignity.
Strong emphasis was placed on ensuring that the structure fits in with the
design of the wider Olympic Park. Externally, the architecture creates a
sense of solidity appropriate to the building’s key role in the utilities
infrastructure in the Olympic Park.The 130,000 bricks used in the design
also reflect the traditional use of dark brick stock in window and corner
details on the former Kings Yard industrial buildings on the site.
At 80 metres long and made from ebony black brick, the substation is
legible at first as one uninterrupted surface; however the envelope is a
more open lattice than it appears. In lower sections, the brick performs as
a loadbearing structure, in others simply as a skin and in the upper
sections it permits ventilation for the internal transformers.
Across the length of the building, the height varies - the eastern tower was
designed to be lower in height, facilitating a viewing corridor to the
Olympic Stadium in the south-west, as well as a view to central London, St
Paul’s and the Swiss Re tower.
Sustainability is at the heart of the substation design through the reuse of
materials from the demolition of the former Kings Yard buildings.The
building also includes a ‘brown roof’ which will allow species to naturally
colonise the site, enhancing the ecological value and biodiversity of the
Olympic Park site by attracting local wildlife.The roof’s weight supplements
a blast protection strategy, one of many technically-demanding aspects of
a challenging brief.
This phenomen of repurposing buildings of the past, particularly of the
scale and design quality of the Bankside Power Station, is something that is
occurring in many major cities: Sydney’s Museum of Modern Art at Circular
Quay, Madrid’s CaixaForum and the Musée D’Orsay in Paris being just
three examples.This tells us something about how we in the modern world
view ourselves. It is a gesture of democracy that we do not demand
purpose built, but are content to adapt edifices of the industrial age to
present day cultural applications.
The Substation Utility Building,
still an active but diminished
power station, has been
repurposed into infrastructure
for this year’s London
Olympics.The lattice pattern
of the upper-level brickwork
helps soften the monolithic
character of the building.
(Photographs courtesy
Olympic Delivery Authority.)