TIGHT FIT

摘要

Planning constraints can have curious effects. In London's Barnsbury, a 1930s storage building and the stable floor beneath, found during excavation, now define the profile and positioning of new housing on this tight site. To the rear of a pub (now housing), in an enclosed yard overlooked by surrounding housing, Buckley Gray has squeezed a terrace of three houses which even limbo under the former pitched roofline. For the neighbours, whose very short back gardens edge much of the site, sticking to the old buildings' volume may have the benefit of containing new visual intrusion. For the architect, the implications were more problematic. The houses are pushed to the back of the available site, against the high wall that was once the solid rear wall of the old buildings, so providing no view out to the rear. While the resulting single-aspect plot is reflected in calling the houses Haven Mews, in fact the plan is so deep that rear windows are essential for daylight, if not for views. And the digging down 1.5m to the stable floor, while not formally constituting a basement with all of the means of escape requirements that go with it, did also cut off the views to the front at this semi-basement level. But the benefit of excavation was to make possible (just), three-storey houses within the previous buildings' envelope.