Brick Morphology
| BRICK MORPHOLOGY. Memorial tearooms, Tottenham Court Road, London There are two primary concepts which inspired the development of the project. The first is the notion of Englishness: the countryside and related themes of the picturesque and gentility. The second is drawn from the history of the site, which sits above a World War II shelter. The building programme is a Memorial and Tearooms. The tearooms, made up of overlapping brick vaults, orientate towards a lake and a ‘compressed landscape’. The memorial is an underground space that includes a suspended reading room – vibrations from the underground train line below are harnessed to recreate the rumblings of the blitz bombing. The language of the architecture and materiality serve to evoke a feeling of displacement from Central London. The architecture looks in on itself and shelters from the busy surroundings by dipping a brick landscape into the site and creating vistas within itself. |
