Source: Clare Melhuish, "At the Carwash", RIBA Journal, January 1999, pp. 48-53.
- Project: Tower Hamlets transport garage, East London.
- Architects: Naser Golzari, Roy Mack, Robert Hodges, Paul Middleton, Patricia Flint (LB Tower Hamlets architects' team).
- Client: London Borough of Tower Hamlets, Transport Section.
- Structural engineer: Chamberlain & Partners.
- Mechanical / electrical engineer: LB Tower Hamlets in-house team.
- Main contractors: Phase 1 — Falcus Construction; Phase 2 — Sindall Construction.
- Building area: 1,500 sq m. Site area: 6,300 sq m.
- Cost: £2,170,000.
Note: a transport garage designed by the architects of the London Borough of Tower Hamlets has produced a combination of bold visual aesthetic and colours suited to the mood of motorists passing by. Clare Melhuish reports.
Ivor Pyrke, head of Tower Hamlets Transport, has ordered a new set of boots for the council's mechanics, because the old boots — caked with years of oil and grime — were beginning to stain the clean floor of the new multi-purpose workshop in Docklands. The bright, well-coloured, warm and open complex represents an immense improvement on the old underground garage. In the new building, when work is finished, the dirty and noisy part of the trade and the social and administrative parts will all come together; and the wash bay and the laundry sit at the meeting of the two.
The corporate planners, when they first saw the design, judged it too "organic" and threatened to put the project out to a fresh competition that would award the work to someone who could supply a more polished, more conventional and more "high-tech" appearance. After some negotiation, the structural columns of the front and the line of the roof were straightened out, and what Naser Golzari called the "free, Aalto-esque" façade of the earlier scheme was lost. (A few years earlier, Golzari had been the curator of a Hans Scharoun exhibition at the RIBA, which had been very well received: he had already shown his interest in organic design.)
Golzari readily acknowledges that the slanted metal stair, which rises to the toilet and the office at the mezzanine, was inspired by Rem Koolhaas's work at Euralille; he also points to the influence of the French Roche Bobois style.
The workshop building, now complete, provides a maintenance environment that is genuinely progressive in spirit.
Naser Golzari and Pierre d'Avoine are at present preparing two projects in Tehran — the Climate House and the Green Office — for the Iran Fuel Conservation Organization.
1 Clare Melhuish.
2 Bavand Behpoor.
