The London studio, PUP Architects, run by Theo Molloy, Chloe Leen and Steve Wilkinson drew up the design for the Architecture Foundation’s new Antepavilion programme, an annual commission sponsored by the property developer Shiva.
PUP's design is a playful subversion of planning legislation, exploiting loopholes for mechanical rooftop equipment to be built without planning permission. The design is a “subversive” duct-shaped pavilion on the roof of a canal-side warehouse. The pavilion invites discussion about the occupation of the city's rooftops by highlighting relaxed permitted development rights. It suggests that if dwellings could be disguised as air conditioning equipment, thousands of micro houses could be built across the city providing new homes.
PUP worked with the clients and the Architecture Foundation to realise the project in July and August 2017. Antepavilion was and will be open to the public at 55 Hoxton Docks on 6-7 August and again on 16-17 September during Open House London.
“While permitted development exists for large scale infrastructural roof installations, little challenge has been made for other viable and productive uses for rooftops. By subverting the form of the permitted and giving it a non-standard use, we hope to bring into question this order of priorities,” said PUP Architects.
And add, “We wanted to provoke a conversation about why, if you can build this type of strange plant equipment on the rooftop, why can we not use it in a more positive way, to inhabit and liberate all these hundreds of thousands of square metres of rooftop space?”
Clad in reversible Tetra-Pak shingles, H-VAC is a proposal primarily functional yet surprisingly sculptural. A shelter in disguise, the enlarged scale allows inhabitation and exploits its inaccessible location, concealing a rooftop garden.
London-based think-tank The Architecture Foundation and Shiva plan to continue the Antepavilion Commission annually, to give emerging architects, artists and designers the chance to create further experimental rooftop structures. The structure joins a collection of other pavilions commissioned by Shiva in recent years for the roof of its Columbia Wharf studios.
These buildings have all been designed as prototypes for alternative ways to live in the city. They aim to challenge decisions by the local planning department to allow a spate of luxury housing blocks to be built along Regent’s Canal – while other types of projects are very difficult to win approval for.
