168 Upper Street by London studio Groupwork will be the focus of the final Dezeen x Knauf Architecture Project Talk, which takes place at 1:00pm London time on Friday 2 July. Register now to watch the webinar.
Groupwork founder Amin Taha and project architect Jason Coe will present on the digital methods they used to reinterpret a nineteenth-century building that was bombed in the second world war.
168 Upper Street in Islington, London
Located in the north London borough of Islington, 168 Upper Street is a terracotta-coloured concrete block that is designed to resemble a Victorian terrace with mismatched windows and openings.
The four-storey building houses three apartments and a showroom for Aria, the contemporary furniture and design company that commissioned the project. The building is a distorted replica of a Victorian corner terrace
Groupwork developed a virtual model of the lost building by studying photographs and carrying out a laser survey of a mirroring building at the other end of the parade.
The architecture studio intentionally avoided creating an identical copy of the original building, as a comment on the fallibility of human memory.
The interior features exposed concrete walls
Instead, Groupwork distorted the virtual replica by adding deliberate and accidental alterations to the digital file, resulting in missing architectural details.
This digital model was then used to create an expanded-polystyrene cast, into which the coloured concrete was poured to f...