Location: London, United Kingdom.

Architect: Squire & Partners.

The Frames is a bespoke development in Shoreditch, providing flexible workspace for small and creative businesses. The five-storey building offers office and studio units, shared meeting rooms, break-out areas, tea points, cycle storage, shower facilities, and a café. The client, Workspace, wanted to move away from their standard ‘business centre’ model towards a co-working approach while retaining individual business units and maximizing lettable area. The building envelope employs a palette of brick, metal, and glass, designed to relate to the area’s traditional warehouse vernacular while providing a contemporary office building. The top two floors of the building feature twisted dark grey perforated aluminum fins, which reference the historical textile manufacturing history of the neighborhood and provide solar shading. The interiors were designed to create a relaxed and comfortable aesthetic in contrast to the raw industrial finishes of the building. The twisted metal fins on the outside of the building are carried through internally to create subtle partitions between the different spaces on the ground floor. The design of breakout spaces on all work floors is light and comfortable, with soft furnishings set against concrete finishes and low pendant lights providing intimacy to the seating areas. On the upper levels, workspace units offer concrete floors and ceilings together with whitewashed walls to create a blank canvas for inhabitants. The shadows cast inside the rooms by the external perforated fins add a layer of visual interest to the spaces and change throughout the day with the movement of the sun. A strong graphic identity is used throughout the building to assist with way-finding, created by Squire & Partners in collaboration with their sister branding company, Mammal. The new development establishes a positive connection to its setting and creates a modern and inspiring workplace.

Photo credit: Jim Stephenson, James Balston.