View from inside the academy towards the Creates Hub. The glazed ends to each pod showcase the Creates Hub and maintain a controlled environment for the users. Floor to ceiling pin boards maximise wall space, storage integrated within the fabric of the walls.
3D isometric view showing the relationship between the Kensington Creates Hub and the main entrance to Kensington Aldridge Academy.
A variety of entrepreneurial spaces for private and collaborative work, presentations and interaction with the wider academy.
At each Aldridge Academy, flexible, modern workspaces have been created for students and members of the community to work together to start their own businesses. Kensington Creates Hub is the most recent of these incubation centres, based within the Kensington Aldridge Academy in West London.
The Creates Hubs are intended as aspirational spaces, giving students insight into the world of work. Funding for these spaces comes from separate and limited budgets. The Foundation had a vision for how the Creates Hubs would work and contract with the surrounding school environment. They developed a detailed brief and the funding to pursue this vision. The challenge for the design team was to provide a highly cost-effective solution that was reflective of contemporary workspaces, a collaborative environment with a variety of different work style settings that users could personalise. As the academy was under construction the design also needed to minimise disruption and delay to the main contract.
The result was the outcome of a collaboration between the Education and Workplace teams at HOK, sharing their knowledge to provide a variety of entrepreneurial spaces, maximising the budget by ensuring that all interventions in the space had multiple functions.
Design and construction was developed with furniture manufacturer Dealerward with whom HOK had worked with previously on workplace interior projects in the City of London. The team developed a standardised birch faced plywood panel that was repeatable and simple to clip together. An architectural language arose that reflected the nature of the construction method, and became a theme that was expressed throughout the project. Importantly, the off-site nature of manufacture meant that quality was carefully controlled and construction limited to a pain free two-week period. The final Hubs have proved very popular with both students and local entrepreneurs.