Incubator Office Units
Concept design
Concept design
Miller Kendrick has been asked to submit proposals for the new business zone at the old Rugby Radio Station development. Central to our idea is a desire to create a scale and architectural language for the employment buildings that responds to the buildings to the north, reinforcing the character of the area and providing architecture that is not alien to it.
Our proposal is for a series of 3 storey incubator buildings that are orientated roughly NW-SE with floor plates that provide approximately 10- 20,000 sq ft of accommodation. The buildings are shown in varying lengths to allow for a mixture of floor plates. Orientating the buildings in this way has several advantages: it allows the office accommodation to benefit from day-long natural light and minimises south facing facades; it also does not restrict light to the street or residential properties on the other side of the road. Crucially the fronts of the buildings are close to the street with main entrances directly o the footpath. All of the car parking is concealed behind the plots. This arrangement ensures that the street is well de ned and has pedestrian activity, whilst the mass does not dominate the housing opposite.
Between the building ‘fingers’ are access roads lined with greenery or lower ‘link’ structures that could provide shared facilities for the pairs of buildings. An important aspect of incubator facilities is ability for tenants to mix, network, share ideas and support one another. Shared facilities can provide a space to do this whilst helping to define the building line and animate the street. The buildings confidently define the streetscape but also have a fine grain that mediates between the housing and the larger units to the south. The buildings are 3 storeys generally but step down to two storeys in places along the primary elevation to respond to the smaller scale of the residential units across the street.