RetroFirst is an AJ campaign to prioritise retrofit over demolition and rebuild. Hundreds of architecture practices, organisations and individuals have declared their support for our campaign
When retrofitting a former Shoreditch warehouse proved unviable, The Office Group hired Waugh Thistleton Architects to replace it with what is now central London’s tallest mass timber office structure, the six-storey Black & White Building. How ambitious is its sustainability?
This £615,000 project comprises the extensive refurbishment and extension of 19th century No 9 Mason’s Yard to create office space set among art galleries in St James’s, London
The practice has reconfigured a two-storey 18th-century building, hemmed in by later development, so as to maximise light – both natural and reflected – to its interiors
Hyperspace has created a 35m2 studio in Hertfordshire with a façade made of 850 scales of charred timber, contrasting with interior finishes of pale poplar plywood panels under white oiled timber rafters
Citizens Design Bureau has completed its refurbishment of Jacksons Lane Theatre, which is housed in a Grade II-listed former church in London’s Highgate
The project, which involved the refurbishment and extension of a Victorian terraced house, has seen the creation of a top-lit living space that is also designed for music practice
Fran Williams visits Crusader and Phoenix, shedkm’s regeneration of several 1840s Manchester cotton mill buildings to deliver a residential community set around a landscaped courtyard
The £220,000 retrofit project replaces the building’s roof with a new trapezoidal pavilion perched over the water
The practice rescued the 1960 Hampstead house from possible demolition, repairing and reworking it as a new family home
The retrofit of an 1860s house includes a new single-storey extension at the rear, designed to enhance the connection between living spaces and garden
The Architects’ Journal Architecture News & Buildings