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Centaur Street
London SE1
£950,000 Share of Freehold Introduction
Accommodation and images
History
Download floorplan (pdf)
The firm dRMM was founded in 1995 by Alex de Rijke, Philip Marsh and Sadie Morgan. One Centaur Street was dRMM’s first project, and firmly established its reputation as one of London’s most innovative young practices.
One Centaur Street occupies the site of a former scrapyard, and was carefully inserted between the railway line from Waterloo and the backs of nearby Victorian terraced houses.
The design of the building is described by dRMM as “a hybrid of the European horizontal apartment and the English vertical terrace house.” Other than in-situ concrete, all of the components were prefabricated. The scheme was completed in 2004.
In an article about the building, The Guardian’s architecture critic Jonathan Glancey wrote:
“A solid concrete block is clad in a form of contemporary clapboard. What might be taken for old railway sleepers bolted along the walls turn out to be dark, concrete sections animating all four sides of the building. Set close together at its base, they grow wider apart as the building pops its head above the railway viaduct, causing the block to lighten as it rises into the London sky.
“This clever, yet restrained, use of materials continues throughout the building. [Alex] de Rijke and his partners, Philip Marsh and Sadie Morgan, have created their own vocabulary of materials, playing intelligently with unusual woods and tiles offset by finely finished concrete, glass and industrial components…
“It is curious that buildings like this are so rare. We have all but forgotten how to build compact city housing so intelligently.”
Writing for The Telegraph, Keith Miller said:
“The project is the brainchild of Roger Zogolovitch, who has spent a quarter of a century at the sharp end of London architecture. In the late 1970s, he became the Z in CZWG, a practice which garlanded the capital with such extrovert buildings as Janet Street-Porter's house in Clerkenwell…
“His collaborators at Centaur Street are the young firm de Rijke Marsh Morgan (dRMM), adroit practitioners of the kind of gently jazzed-up modernism – a dash of industrial chic, a twist of retro – that has become commonplace in France, the Netherlands and Germany over the past decade, but here has been largely confined to the interiors of trendy bars, art galleries and occasional one-off domestic projects for private clients.
“Centaur Street attempts to apply the formula to speculative housing in the great London tradition. It is a tight block of four more or less two-storey apartments, set hard up against the brick viaduct walls. The building is made of reinforced concrete, poured into wooden moulds on site for that National Theatre touch. The internal stairs are also concrete, a hardwearing pebbly mass cast into chunky blocks. The rooms fan out from the stairs in a nice, theatrical arrangement whereby you get mezzanine galleries overlooking double-height living areas – as in a 1,001 loft-style developments – but also smaller, cosier bedrooms and bathrooms above. Train noise is muffled by a thick, blank wall…
“The outside of the block is faced in aluminium, and striped with synthetic boards embossed with the same woody pattern as the cast concrete inside. These become more widely spaced as you move up the elevation, letting the sky play on the metal in between.
“You wouldn't want to overplay the traditional elements of the design, but the effect is a bit like the changing rhythm of windows on Georgian and Regency terraced houses. Certainly, parts of the development are picturesque in a very traditional sense, such as the irregular arrangement of windows and the many contrasts of texture…
“And the scale and profile of the block is very much that of a short London terrace, even if the internal organisation goes across as well as up, and there are several borrowings from the Modernist canon – wide picture windows, a flat roof, all that blessed concrete.”
The Centaur Street scheme has won the following awards:
Mies van der Rohe Awards shortlisting, 2005
Design Excellence Award, AIA London, 2004
Civic Trust Award, 2004
‘London Building of the Year, RIBA, 2003
AJ First Building Award, 2003
Housing Award, RIBA, 2003
London Regional Award, RIBA, 2003
Building For Life Award, CABE , 2003
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