Architects: 6a architects.
Location: London, GB.
Year: 2012.
Photographs: David Grandorge + 6a architects.
The South London Gallery was enlarged in 2010 by 6a Architects, who turned it from a single gallery interior into an expanded sequence of interior and external rooms housing a variety of simultaneous uses.
An artist-in-residence apartment has been added to the second story of the adjacent abandoned home at No. 67, which has been renovated to include a café on the first floor, exhibition spaces above, and exhibition spaces. The new spaces maintain the previous layout, but the architectural language has been reduced and abstracted to give a ghostly impression of the former home.
A double-height space going back to the gallery and through the new Fox Garden to the Clore Education Studio has been created behind the house as a result of a three-story extension that has been built.
The use of izé’s Budapest handles and bathroom signs, created by architect and design critic Edwin Heathcote with a simple elegance that is both of today and carries echoes of earlier times, was highly appropriate given the practice’s interest in embodying historic memory in contemporary interpretations.
