West Kentish Town Estate

AHMM - Year Out

The Brief:

Whilst working at AHMM I worked on the development of West Kentish Town Estate. The client brief called for the delivery and re-provision of a mixture of housing tenures and typologies, set within a coherent masterplan that overcomes issues with the current Estate. These include overcrowding, accessibility, connectivity and failing buildings.

The brief sets out to target the re-provision of the 316 existing homes on the estate, of which 52 are leaseholders. The brief also sets out the target provision of 564 more homes with a total of 39% affordable homes across the proposed development.

My Role:

The work I undertook whilst working with the West Kentish Town Estate team was to help in setting out the principles for an approach to a masterplan design, including landscape, housing, and height. It was a fascinating project to be a part of and learn from, especially due to its focus towards sustainability and social housing.

My first role in the team was to help in plot testing across the site to rest unit sizes and numbers across the masterplan, within the principles of height. To help in this process I’d create massing blocks in MicroStation, 3d print them, and then place them into our physical model. This working model helped the team test both the distribution of massing within the site boundary and how these principles meet the existing context at site edges.

For each of the massing options, I helped the team produce a variety of floor plans and potential flat layouts. To do this I used MicroStation and previous AHMM flat layouts as precedents, however, it was initially a difficult process. I had to learn new software whilst meeting the team’s required deadlines to produce multiple plans and flat layout options in a short period. However, thanks to the support from the team I was able to adapt quickly and, consequently, my workflow, efficiency, and time management dramatically improved. These massing studies and principles were presented in a series of client design workshops and dedicated feedback sessions. This was a very insightful process as it helped further my understanding of the focus and priorities of the council, client, and residents, and how an architect manages all their respective expectations and desires effectively.

One of my key responsibilities whilst working with the team was to produce a variety of street perspectives. We wanted the drawings to visually feel soft, friendly, and cartoon-esque as they were produced to be presented in city council meetings and to the current inhabitants to show how the area may change under the proposed redevelopment. To help achieve this I used a combination of a 3d model created in MicroStation, Procreate to hand draw in details, and then Photoshop. This was an interesting process for me as it furthered my understanding of the best ways to coherently convey your project’s ideas to non-architects.

In addition to producing street perspectives, I produced sections for a variety of proposed massing options. Here I use a combination of MicroStation, Illustrator, and Photoshop to produce these drawings. This was a valuable process that greatly improved my time management skills and efficiency as I was tasked with producing a large number of architectural drawings in a short period.