BLACK KITE
Bureau de Change have completed a creative studio for Black Kite, an independent visual effects and design studio in East London, curating a series of intersecting and carved-out cylinders. These configure a sequence of spaces with varying degrees of privacy; informed by the heritage of the site’s industrial past.
The client’s brief called for a specific working environment; production and visual effects suites that are isolated from external sources of light and sound. Bureau de Change responded to these conditions by devising a spatial strategy conceptualised from the site’s industrial past as an Engineers and Iron Foundry.
Geometrical forms of traditional iron kilns reprise themselves in the proposal as a composition of dispersed intersecting circles, mapped across the grid system established by the existing columns. Each volume contains a rectangular void, enclosing the production, editing, and colour suites in a controlled private environment. Smaller cylinders intersect the private working space to create transitioning thresholds.
At the ground floor, the open plan lounge in the centre links the reception in the front with the open plan production desks in the back. The exposed production desks are undesignated, allowing for ease of access and flexible impromptu usage. The kitchen inhabiting one of the cavities is cladded in stainless steel to reflect light and act as a distinct centrepiece of the room by the entrance becoming the social core of the office. Handmade glazed ceramic tiles circumnavigate the curved recycled plastic countertop.
Carefully curated furniture activate the space and create a homely and comfortable atmosphere, placed among the cavities and the negative spaces formed between the volumes. The proposed layout offers access to a gradating degree of porosity and permeability in work-space environments, incorporating and catering to preferential cultures, values, and behaviours of people. The spaces are not separated into different sectors but are connected seamlessly into one plan, offering a sense of discovery through different layers.
