Sands End Arts and Community Centre

Providing spaces for art exhibitions and community events, this RIBA Stirling Award-nominated project is located a stone's throw from the Parson's Green conservation area.

Exterior view of Sands End builds from the road, with people walking past.

Key information

Architect

Mae

Client

Hammersmith and Fulham Council

Value

£2M

Year of Completion

2021

Sector

Services

Challenge

The project restored and completely retrofitted the 1903 Clancarty Lodge, adjoining it to a new ancillary café and children’s day nursery. Together the old and new form the nucleus of a new community hub for the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham. The building complex frames a courtyard at the centre of the site. Working alongside Mae Architects, we provided MEP Engineering and Lighting Design for the project.

The building, which sits beside Fulham’s South Park, was designed to have low environmental impact and utilises sustainably sourced cross laminated timber (CLT) throughout as the primary structure, lowering embodied carbon relative to more traditional construction methods.

To enable flexibility of the spaces for a range of uses and functions, our design approach was to implement simple and unobtrusive MEP services appropriate to their setting. A key priority was to provide easy to use and maintain systems, that reduce costs by being energy efficient, and without running services through the exposed ceiling. The fabric and glazing strategy carefully balance winter passive solar gain with summer comfort, without resorting to complex cooling or shading devices. The main spaces within the building (main hall, cafe and nursery) are naturally ventilated, providing free cooling without air-conditioning plant.

Our project team

Total of 2 people

David Atkinson

BSc MCIBSE
Principal Engineer
Partner

Lidia Guerra

MEng CEng MCIBSE
Senior Engineer
Partner

Video for RIBA Stirling Prize shortlist 2022

Lighting the space

When designing the lighting, one challenge was to let the pure geometric forms of the architecture shine, and to complement the exposed natural materials. With this in mind, we’ve created lines of LED fittings, simple in colour and shape, and varied mountings and brightness to achieve uniformity with the steep sloped ceilings. A full LED system with daylight dimming throughout matches the energy efficiency aspirations of the whole project.