The Rich Mix Cultural Foundation is a £22m capital funded, multi-cultural public arts project situated in London's East end. The project, which is housed within a series of former warehouse buildings, is currently nearing completion. It comprises performance, exhibition, creative workspaces and an arts cinema.

Drdharchitects have been involved at various stages of the project's conception, from assisting the Chief Executive as design advisors in procuring the shell of the building, to the strategic briefing of the specialist areas of fit-out, including the cinemas.

 

The practice was subsequently appointed as the designers for several areas of the building including broadcast studios for BBC London and a series of recently completed office spaces for the Foundation.

The offices are defined through a series of planes, inserted into part of an existing warehouse floor. These are made of fibreglass, formed around simple timber frames and act both as partitions, moveable screens and a ceiling plane which occupies the central bay of the plan. They are positioned in relation to issues of programme and found conditions within the space and are used to define meeting and presentation spaces. For us they are also concerned with issues of time in various senses. Beyond the layers of process which are visible in the finished surface, the screens change and give depth to the light as it moves through the space. In their own movement and overlapping they register a more immediate timescale of use.

 

The project responds to the traces and memories of the original warehouse floor, a fragment of which it now occupies. The existing buildings are constructed almost entirely of poured concrete, structured through a simple, economic and repetitive frame.

In the spaces we have made, the raw beauty of the concrete frame is allowed to remain, amplified and literally reflected in another poured material, the fibreglass. The simple structure of the screens, recalls this larger structure, as the fibreglass ceiling panels echo the scale of the shutter marks on the underside of the concrete slabs. Beyond these major elements, the practice designed a series of fixed furniture pieces, utilising a finer polished fibreglass for worktops, as well as the suspended light fitting which are again scaled in response to the structure of the existing space. These pieces extend the practice's growing experience in furniture and product design.