British architect Nicholas Grimshaw explains the impact that limited resources had on the housing block he designed with Terry Farrell, in this exclusive video interview created for our high-tech architecture series.
Completed in 1970 by Farrell and Grimshaw Partnership ? the architecture practice set up by the duo five years earlier ? Park Road Apartments is an aluminium-clad residential tower that overlooks Regent's Park in London.
Forty flats are contained within the 10-storey building ? including the former homes of Grimshaw and Farrell, who lived in the tower for several years with their young families.
Park Road Apartments by Farrell and Grimshaw Partnership was completed in 1970
The architects were both members of the Mercury Housing Society, a co-operative consisting of 40 friends and aspiring homeowners. "Park Road was a co-ownership housing society and we thought the answer to life was to gather some kind of community," Grimshaw told Dezeen in the interview at his home.
Amongst the co-operative's members was also structural engineer Anthony Hunt, who worked on a number of seminal high-tech projects including Reliance Controls by Team 4 and Richard Rogers' Inmos Microprocessor Factory.
Park Road Apartments made history as the first co-housing scheme to procure a site in central London and was built with a limited budget.
"We were all broke," said Grimshaw. "And the idea was to build it as cheaply as you possibly could."
The tower is ...