The Hithe is a flexible, demountable building in London
Photo by Mike Massaro
In this interview, we connect with London architecture studio IF_DO, which has recently completed co-working building The Hithe that can be broken down and rebuilt in a different location.
It was designed for CIRCuIT (Circular Construction in Regenerative Cities), a collaborative project funded by the EU's Horizon 2020 program. Other designs are in Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Helsinki.
Tell us about your studio, and your demountable building The Hithe in London’s Rotherhithe area?
The three of us—Thomas Bryans, Sarah Castle and Al Scott—founded IF_DO in 2014, having originally met as first-year architecture students at the University of Edinburgh. From the outset, we were very clear that we wanted the practice’s work to bring social and environmental benefits to the places and communities that we were working within.
The Hithe is a good example of that. As the site is only on an 11-year lease, it provided a really interesting opportunity to create something that would both support the local community, and challenge the potential of what a ‘temporary’ building could be from a circular economy perspective.
We were appointed by the local authority in late 2017 alongside Meanwhile Space CIC, a long-term collaborator of ours and an operator of—you guessed it—meanwhile projects. The original appointment was essentially to establish what the brief should be. To do so, we undertook extensive engagement with the local community and local businesses to understand what they needed, and what they wanted and didn’t want on the site. Ultimately a brief emerged around micro-work units that would be big enough and affordable for one or two people, alongside two slightly larger offices for local small businesses.
Sarah Castle, Al Scott and Thomas Bryans of IF_DO. Photo by Simon Webb
How did you come up with the design of The Hithe?
One of the key desires from the community was that the building shouldn’t look temporary. The site is close to an area that has been undergoing significant redevelopment, and they did not want it to feel like another construction site, so shipping containers and temporary site offices were ruled-out at the outset. There was an aspiration for a higher quality of temporary architecture.
Designing a decade-long building of a high architectural standard, to be delivered on a very tight budget, was always going to be challenging, but we added to that with the ambition to make it demountable and reusable. We had been having conversations with Meanwhile Space for a while about the potential of relocatable micro-work units, and the Hithe was the perfect opportunity to start testing some of those ideas. The need for affordable workspace and the availability of vacant lots for temporary usage is a reality in many places, and especially so in London, so it’s a model that could be replicated quite widely.
“The site is on an 11-year lease, so it provided an interesting opportunity to create something that would challenge the potential of what a ‘temporary’ building could be from a circular economy perspective.”
The site was previously occupied by a row of three houses which were demolished several years ago. When the houses were demolished, they were taken down to grade, and the concrete slab was left in place. By designing the building to sit on those existing foundations, we were able to avoid the need for any new concrete in the construction. The plan emerged relatively quickly: defined by the dimensions of the slab, and with a requirement for 10 micro-work units. A central route through the ground floor accommodates the shared facilities and provides access from the street to the communal garden at the back.
The form of the building was more of an urban response than anything else. The two large windows on the upper floor are aligned with streets on either side, to act as a beacon to help draw people toward the building, and hopefully to help increase footfall to the local businesses that are around it.
What’s next for your next focus or project?
Significantly reducing the embodied carbon of our projects has become an increasing priority for us, and we’re currently on site with three projects that address this in very different ways: a large-scale retrofit project of a former newspaper print works, a new community center with an all-timber structure, and an electrical substation where the primary structure is all re-used steel (a first in the UK).
Photo by Mike Massaro
Anything interesting you’ve read, listened to, or discovered recently about sustainability?
We’re currently in the middle of Flourish: Design Paradigms for Our Planetary Emergency by Sarah Ichioka and Michael Pawlyn. It’s a brilliant book on regenerative design principles and system change that’s well worth a read. It’s also accompanied by an excellent podcast, for those who prefer listening to reading!
What are technologies or developments that should be adopted more broadly to further sustainable design?
We would love to see a far wider adoption of natural bio-based materials and fully breathable construction, especially in residential buildings. For example, mass timber frames with wood fiber insulation and lime render. In some ways, it is a very traditional form of construction, but it can help create a very healthy internal environment, as well as sequestering large amounts of carbon.
Photo by Mike Massaro
Do you have any ideas for how to get more people on board with sustainability?
Any easy things people can do? There are so many layers to this. Firstly, it’s about education, but more fundamentally, it’s about helping people to imagine what a cleaner, greener, more sustainable future could be like for them and their communities.
This is why organizations like the Transition Movement are so brilliant—they help inspire people to take action. We all have agency to make change, whether it’s being conscious about what we buy, campaigning, or lobbying our elected representatives to make change on a national level.
What is your studio’s connection to sustainability? Is it measurable? What are your challenges?
As architects, we feel a deep sense of responsibility to help tackle the climate and biodiversity emergency. With buildings generating around 40% of global CO2 emissions, we obviously have a significant role to play. When we set up IF_DO, two of us came with particular Passivhaus expertise, and those principles are ones that we try to embody in every project. Understanding how our buildings perform is a crucial part of that.
The key challenges are typically the budget and the priorities of clients. When budgets are limited, and where the brief has clear spatial requirements, it is unfortunately sustainability aspects that go beyond building regulations that can easily get cut. It could be said that the bigger challenge is therefore the low-level of minimum energy performance required by regulation. It means that there is a significant onus on us as architects to help educate our clients and to convince them of the value and the need to go further. We are lucky to have very good clients, but ultimately we can only go as far as they are willing to go.
