This is a single story laboratory, at 91 Amhurst Park N16, inserted into the client’s back garden to accommodate a growing business.

From the ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW 1986

If London architecture is to have any meaning, it must come to terms with the city’s unique pattern of a series of high-density villages and, at the same time, recognize the demands of new uses. Tom Kay’s laboratory for Applied Biology does just this.

The client had extended his home pharmaceutical manufacture to his back garden – into greenhouses, sheds and other temporary structures. When, in 1979, he wanted to house part of the operation in a new building on the same site, the local authority was at first less than helpful. Applying the most banal and trite of all planning dogmas, it required that the new building should, ‘fit in’ – that it should not only look residential but be capable of reverting to residential use once industrial activity is over.

By 1983, the implications of Britain’s terrifying decline in industrial employment had become apparent even to the Hackney planners. A new piece of architecture was allowed which would be primarily an efficient laboratory building. Kay’s answer was to create a structure that, white plainly expressing new uses, had an affinity to the domestic scale of its surroundings – it resembles a kind of long orangery or conservatory.

The PVC barrel vault, that is supported on the cantilevered ends of the laminated timber roof beams, provides a covered passage for the small fork-lift trucks that trundle between the main house and the ancillary buildings at the back of the site. It flanks a long, narrow production building and it is echoed by the vaulted plant room running along the east side of the production space. This was originally intended to house an existing grapevine growing in one of the greenhouses on the site but sadly, this elegant and gentle mix of nature and machinery was abandoned for cost reasons.

While sharing a fascination for elegantly detailed glazing with High-Tech architects, Kay is definitely not of that school. The timber and bricks would never be seen in a High-Tech building. The Kay approach is in some ways more honest: whereas
things are often not quite what they seem to be in High-Tech buildings (cladding posing as structure, for instance), in Kay’s work everything is precisely articulated and every element can be clearly seen to be doing a job. This approach distinguishes much of the best British work and it comes out of a tradition of clarity, honesty of construction and truth to materials stretching back to the Arts and Crafts movement and the late Gothic Revival.

Review by A+U Magazene

The client, a biochemist, started production of pharmaceuticals in the ground floor of his house in Amhurst Park many years ago. Over the years production has expanded into a number of outbuildings, green houses, and temporary structures within his garden, and into another a house in Cranwich Road.

Following problems with the local planning authority over the question of non-conforming use, separate factory facilities were purchased two miles away. This proved less than satisfactory, in part because the client required to closely supervise activity and felt that operations were becoming dispersed.

Scheme 1: By 1979, the local authority, concerned at employment losses within the borough, agreed to a development on the newly acquired site in Cranwich Road, provided that the new building would “look residential” and revert to residential use, when LAB Ltd. ceased operations. A project was drawn up showing, the proposed new building before and after a theoretical eventual “conversion”. By 1980’ this idea was abandoned as being over-complex.

Scheme As Built: By 1983, employment prospects had deteriorated such that the planners felt that they could welcome a development without the previous residential strings.

The scheme, as built, takes the proposition that the spread of facilities on three road frontages, would be unlikely to alter and that a link building might be sited to connect the different locations. The gardens were well developed with lawns and an orchard. The building takes its linear form from the requirement to make a covered connection for mini-forklifts across the garden, the idea of an Orangery being somewhere in the back of the designer’s mind.

MANUFACTURING PROCESS: The manufacture of both edible and inedible pharmaceuticals is controlled by the Medicines Inspectorate, which plays down guide lines for the degree of cleanliness for each stage of the production. The highest category being for the weighing, mixing and bottling. lt is these latter processes which are housed in the new building (with some room for expansion into the new packing space and office).

SITE ORGANIZATION AND PLANNING: The building reflects the need for three parallel routes:
1. Pedestrian/materials: Linking the various buildings under cover.
2. Production sequence: Weighing, mixing, filling, capping, labeling and packing.
3. Linking production spaces, but separated from them.

The building alignment is generated from the boundary with the adjoining house and projects on into the garden. At the South end, the covered way extends beyond the body of the building, to provide continuous cover for the forklift and personnel. At this point it is no longer supported on the cantilever beams and is thus propped up on an “umbrella”, which operates as the termination to an otherwise indeterminate form and as a focus for the approach from the road entrance gates.

The geometry of the joint with the existing building at the North end is eased by the circular encasing of the existing square brick pier, utilizing the segments as pipe risers, and thus forming a non-directional pivot.
A long narrow plant room is located parallel to the production spaces. Thus the air conditioning plant/ductwork, water and electrical services and all interconnecting pipework between production machinery can be located outside the clean areas. Until cost savings were initiated at the beginning of the contract, the plant room also housed an existing grape vine which had been growing in a green house until its demolition took place.

STRUCTURAL SYSTEM: Laminated timber beams at 1.5 metre intervals spun 6 metres from a masonry spine wall onto a laminated purlin supported on reinforced concrete columns at 3 metre centres. The beams extend as double cantilevers, supporting two glazed barrel vaults; on the West side covering the plant room and on the East side, the covered way

A structural ground slab on ground beams and piles was necessary, primarily due to the mature oak at the South and of the new building.