top end but temporary apartment hotels

Eye catching temporary apartment hotels could be erected in the north and south of Hackney over the next few years, before being donated to charities for the homeless, as the result of a radical design breakthrough by local architect Tim Pyne.

Sclater Street in Shoreditch has been selected as the most likely first location for a pioneering thirty two unit self-catering hotel which will take only nine weeks to build, and operate for eight years, before being taken apart and relocated to another piece of wasteland somewhere else in the capital.

The M-hotel – pronounced motel - is a development of the highly acclaimed M-house, a luxurious two-bedroom metal bungalow Pyne designed with Michael Howe of Mae Architects.

The apartment units are made from insulated aluminium panels and lined internally with plaster walls. Made in Newcastle, they contain state of the art kitchen and bathroom fittings, and top end furnishings in the living and sleeping areas. The apartments, each of which has a balcony, slot into a customised steel rack, and are designed to last one hundred years in a changing series of locations..

“At average rental costs for the area the self-catering units will pay for themselves within twenty four months,” Pine explains. “The new hotels will put unused land waiting for development to good use, and give a better return to landowners than temporary car parks, an all too common use of land in limbo. They will draw the European business people arriving to work in the City’s new skyscrapers into Hackney, which will benefit from higher council tax revenues and increased spending in local shops, bars and restaurants. At the moment international business staff are often put up in hotel chains or distant suburban flats with long commute times. Temporary self catering hotels of this kind are also an obvious way to accommodate people working on Olympic projects in the north and east of the borough over the next four years.”

The hotels could turn Hackney’s backstreets into designer locations. “Attractive visual branding from fashion labels like Paul Smith and Prada will be mounted on the external panels of the hotels, sharing and promoting their visual cool,” he says. “Olympic sponsors may also be interested in this feature.”

As well as providing much needed accommodation for the growing international business community, at high speed and low cost, Pyne believes that his innovation will benefit some of the poorest people in the capital too.

“I would like to think that when the apartments are removed from temporary sites, having paid for themselves many times over, the units could be given to charities so that homeless people and couples caught in miserable, temporary accommodation could benefit from them,” says Pyne. “I believe that many large companies could be persuaded to do this. I also think that housing associations and charities will realise that units of this kind can be deployed more quickly than traditional new build, and can complement their modernisation plans.”

“The M-hotel is an innovation with potentially huge local benefits,” says Patrick Nicholson, a construction specialist at the Hackney Enterprise Network. “Hackney’s daytime workforce in Broadgate and in the Olympic Park will get local accommodation, landowners will get higher rental income, local traders will get increased business, the Town Hall will get more Council Tax, and charities and the homeless will get a valuable trickle down too. It’s a great idea.”

Pyne’s rapid assembly, mobile M-Hotel has already generated enquiries from developers in Libya and Dubai, from enthusiasts for extreme sports who need accommodation near mountains and glaciers, and from the organisers of an international sports event shortly to take place in Africa.

recycled fabrics key to sustainable fashion

The innovative design work of goodone, an ethical fashion business based in Tudor Road, Hackney which uses only recycled fabrics, features in a recent online report by Clare Davidson for the BBC.

Goodone - which supplies retail outlets in London, Manchester, Brighton and Glasgow along with customers in Europe and Japan - is run by Nin Castle and Phoebe Emerson.

The company "mass produces the one-off" by creating individual garments from a unique combination of hand selected recycled fabrics.

The company won a £15,000 Trevor Campbell award for enterprise in 2007. A more recent grant of £16,000 from the London Development Agency has enabled goodone to provide advice and guidance to students and other companies on how the fashion industry can become sustainable.

"We enjoy instigating positive change in the industry," they say.

new wave of eco-building in hackney

The Olympic organisers and the developers in Broadgate aren’t the only people erecting futuristic buildings in Hackney. The borough is now attracting some of the most innovative architects in London, and they are using wood, straw, recycled materials and wind turbines in their attempts to reduce the local impact on the environment. And Hackney’s school leavers are also about to get the chance to train as pioneers in the new building techniques.

Plastered bales of straw are the main material used in an innovative new building at Hackney City Farm in Goldsmith’s Row, where a training centre designed by the environmental experts Amazonails has recently opened.

“The foundations of the centre are rammed earth tyres, and the bale walls are plastered with lime and clay recycled form the farm’s own pottery,” says Emma Appleton. “The main cross beam of the building is made of greenheart wood, a tropical hardwood reclaimed from the Norfolk sea defences. We also salvaged a teak boat from the 1930s that has been stripped down to make the desks in the room.”

Cath Hassel of Ech20 was the first teacher to use the space, in a workshop on water efficiency for Town Hall staff. “This is the best room I have ever trained in,” she says. “It has warm natural light, and uses natural materials. The interaction between the delegates was really high and I’m convinced the room aided that.”

“This building points the way forward for companies looking for less environmentally damaging forms of creating homes and workspace,” says Patrick Nicholson, a construction specialist at the Hackney Enterprise Network. “The materials for a house built with straw bales cost significantly less than brick and block. The outlay for a family-sized strawbale house in the UK would be about £60,000 plus the price of the land. Plastered strawbale walling has a surprisingly high level of fire resistance, and the UK currently produces 4 million tons of straw a year more than it needs. This is sufficient to build 250,000 well insulated and affordable new homes a year.”

Strawbale building techniques will be demonstrated at this year's Ecobuild show, an annual event dedicated to sustainable forms of design and construction, at Earl's Court from 26-28 February.

Hackney Council recently granted planning permission for a nine-storey tower in Murray Grove in Shoreditch which the architects, Waugh Thistleton, say will be the world’s tallest timber residential building.

The Stadthaus will be constructed using an Austrian solid timber system with wood from sustainable spruce forests, giving the tower – which will only take nine weeks to build – an unusually low carbon footprint. The stair and lift cores, load-bearing walls and even the floor slabs will all be constructed entirely from timber. Demand for the nineteen flats in the tower was extremely high and all the apartments were reserved on a recent launch day.

Waugh Thistleton’s designers are also the brains behind the fourteen storey Kinetica, fifty six apartments and three floors of commercial space to be built in Ramsgate Street, behind the Kingsland Shopping Centre, by 2010.

The futuristic tower is specially designed to harness wind power, which will be captured on its south side by four vertical turbines designed and installed by wind technology experts Quiet Revolution. Any renewable energy generated by the turbines which is not used by the residents will be forwarded to the National Grid.

The building will also have a very unusual façade – pixillated like an over-enlarged photograph - inspired by the images produced by German artist Gerhad Richter. The external surface will consist of thousands of black, grey and white panels made from waste timber.

Kinetica will be launched at the Hoxton Hotel on Great Eastern Street on Wednesday 20th February.

“These ground-breaking new buildings are pointers to the way the construction industry is moving,” says Dave Geddes, who runs a specialist centre for new construction techniques at Hackney Community College on Falkirk Street. “That’s why we are launching a new Diploma for 14-19 year olds in construction and the built environment in September. The next generation of architects and builders will need to be experts in low carbon footprint buildings which draw on renewable energy sources, and the college intends to stay at the cutting edge of the industry.”

The new qualification in construction and the environment is a joint initiative linking the college and Stoke Newington, Haggerston and Cardinal Pole schools.

“The construction industry is booming in Hackney, but it’s also changing its spots at the same time,” says Patrick Nicholson. “Local builders, and people buying or commissioning new buildings locally, are being forced to reduce their impact on the environment by high energy prices, new regulations and public opinion. Every building firm, and young person thinking of entering the industry, must move with the times and play their part in making London a more sustainable and cleaner city to live in.”

hackney's house of straw is sign of buildings to come

Plastered bales of straw are the main material for an innovative new building at Hackney City Farm, an education and training facility completed by Amazonails in December. The building points the way forward for companies and clients looking for sustainable and less environmentally damaging forms of construction over the years ahead.

The materials for a house built with straw bales cost about the same as those needed for a conventional timber-frame house, but significantly less than brick and block. A family-sized strawbale house in the UK would cost about £60,000 plus the price of the land. The UK currently produces 4 million tons of straw a year more than it needs. This is sufficient to build 250,000 homes a year.

Strawbale buildings are not the fire risk you might imagine. They have been subjected to rigorous testing by Amazonails, who say that the bales resist burning for the same reason it is difficult to burn a telephone directory. It is easy to set fire to one page, but not to a dense block of paper. When plastered, strawbale walls have an even greater resistance to fire.

Design consultant Barbara Jones, the director of Amazonails, recently supervised the construction of the largest strawbale building in the UK, the new offices and auction room of fine art auctioneers G E Sworder and Sons of Stansted Mountfitchet in Essex, which will open in May. The building was constructed using a new technique called ‘compressive framing’ in which the roof is supported on a timber frame while the strawbale walls are constructed. It is then lowered onto the strawbales, which become the loadbearing structure. The roof then protects the strawbale walls from the weather while they are being plastered.

Strawbale building techniques will be demonstrated at this year's Ecobuild show, an annual event dedicated to sustainable forms of design and construction, at Earl's Court from 26-28 February.