Housing
Private Houses
Education
Healthcare
Wandsworth Bridge Road
St. John's Therapy Centre
Waldron Health Centre
Centre for Reproductive Medicine
Streatham Common Health Centre
Akerman Road PCC
Lambeth ACCORD
Commercial
Arts & Culture
Leisure & Exhibitions
Adaptive Reuse
Regeneration
Urban Design

Lambeth ACCORD has provided training and advice to benefit disabled people in this London Borough for nearly 25 years. It combines conference space (used also by a number of Evangelical churches) with offices for fourteen charities.

In December 2008 Buschow Henley won an International RIBA Competition to modernise the centre. The scheme seeks to humanise the original Brutalist 1960s concrete building, to create identity, to foster communality and to respond to disability in both a practical and delightful manner. Rather than recreate the physical environment in terms of what one can see and therefore what it looks like, our intention is to conceive of it through sensation- touch or feel, smell or taste, sound or sight- so that it might in this way bring pleasure.
The blinded man sees with his ears and hands
Robert Graves, Recalling War

The design transforms this community building into a truly public one, improving access to the conference facilities and office space. The scheme will create a public foyer, reception & bar, two conference halls (churches) and four further meeting rooms. The 1st to 4th floors are refurbished to re-provide the office space for the existing tenants and a 2-storey bamboo-clad extension at the rear creates a further 400m2 of office space. The basement accommodates parking and storage.

Our scheme will be, but more importantly will feel, sustainable. For much of the year spaces will be naturally ventilated and daylit minimizing energy consumption, which will reduce the demand and in turn make 100% on-site renewable energy generation feasible. All of this is designed to create a sustainable, humane and inclusive facility, which is flexible and secure in which llandscape habitats will play a significant part.

Our strategy will reinvigorate the culture at Lambeth ACCORD.  Buschow Henley are working with structural engineer Jane Wernick Associates, environmental engineer ZEF, Landscape Projects, ARUP Ecology and cost consultant BPTW.