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SAINSBURY’S LONDON, ENGLAND, 1931–1933
Engineer Sir Owen Williams (1890–1969) who had designed Boots’ Wet Goods pharmaceutical factory went on to design numerous others including Sainsbury’s in London. His work with concrete transformed modern construction technologies.25 Owen Williams saw concrete as a universal material representing the future that provided factories with obstruction-free spaces in the form of a “shell surrounding a process.” Food processing and meatpacking are processes essential to urban life. Proximity to customers became all the more necessary as such food-related commerce moved from the home to large production facilities in the early days of mass production. As grocers became monopolies they often made their own prepared food, which was processed in cities to save on transport and refrigeration costs. One such company, Sainsbury’s, founded in 1863, was for decades the largest grocery retailer in Great Britain. The company was best known for their own brand of cooked meats, sausages, pies, and prepared meals (which they invented). Scraps of discarded meat, dirty floors, and crowded conditions in early facilities instigated a project in 1930 for a new hygienic processing factory in London. In the heart of the industrial city, Williams designed a six-story, 46,000-square-meter building on an irregularly shaped site along Rennie Street in Blackfriars. By using 25-centimeter-thick, flat-slab concrete floors supported on pyramidal mushroom columns that had a folded Cubist quality (1.5 meters in diameter for the basement and decreasing in diameter on the upper floors), Williams was able to design the structure with a regular, 13-by-11-meter grid and 4.5-meter floor-to-floor heights. The Sainsbury’s factory was the first flat-slab concrete construction in London and the first structure in England built of poured-in-place concrete. Steel casement windows with translucent upper panes filled the structural framework with diffused light. The central section of the roof contained glass round lights set in concrete, as a skylight, and the interior had partitions in metal and glass. The factory was built in two phases: the main building and an annex. Seemingly, form followed function in every detail, including the hygienic,
VERTICAL URBAN FACTORY THE MODERN FACTORY CASE STUDY
VERTICAL URBAN FACTORY THE MODERN FACTORY THE ART OF THE ENGINEER
SIR OWEN WILLIAMS & PARTNERS,
easy-to-clean tile floors that were impervious to spills and food waste. The ample light and cleanliness gave the sense of “going from a slum into Buckingham Palace,” stated a former employee in 1937.26 Designed to accommodate 700 workers during one shift, the factory could accommodate 2,100 workers per day over three shifts. Production was organized vertically. The basement held the curing cellar, storage, pigs’ heads and brisket boning, the boiler room, and a paternoster elevator that ran on pulleys in a circular motion. The ground-floor loading bay spanned the full 26-meter width of the building. There, pig carcasses and raw goods were unloaded and moved to the upper floors by lifts, and final goods were sent
Y Owen Williams, Sainsbury’s factory, exterior view under construction, London, 1934–1936
Y Working from overhead conveyors,1936 X Women in company work uniforms stuffing sausage, 1936