The Crypt at Christ Church Spitalfields
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David Grandorge Download Original
The brief for the project to restore the crypt at this Nicholas Hawksmoor church in London was to provide separate but flexible spaces for performance, prayer and the parish, as well as a café.
The architect made an urban topography with a ramp of york stone that explicitly connects the ground of the city to the space of the crypt. The material of the pavement extends throughout the crypt and makes a public space inside. The brick vaulting is lime-rendered and lime-washed to unify the space of the vaults and reflect light.
The client’s brief specified densely occupied public spaces with high internal thermal gain during events, which made some form of cooling provision necessary. The provision of external mechanical cooling plant was considered inappropriate for this historic setting and, while the team did consider the use of ground source technologies for heating and cooling, they were rejected because the site is built on an ancient burial site and the vaulted roof of the crypt was too low to accommodate a boring rig. Instead, the design focus turned to the opportunities represented by the fabric of the building itself, exploiting its thermal mass, thermal stability and the large surface area of the below-ground tunnels and crypt as a heat sink.
Data
- Begun: Aug 2014
- Completed: Nov 2015
- Floor area: 750m2
- Sector: Religious
- Total cost: £2.3M
- Procurement: JCT Standard Form 2011 with quantities
- Address: Spitalfields, London, E1 6LY, United Kingdom
Professional Team
- Architect: Dow Jones Architects
- Client: Parochial Church Council of Christ Church
- Client representative: Heather Stanley, HTGT
- Services design: OR Consulting
- Structural Design Consultant: Momentum Structural Engineers
- Quantity surveyor: Pierce Hill
- AV design: Idium Technology
- Lighting design: Mindseye Lighting
- Catering Design: Moore Design Catering Consultancy
- CDM Co-ordinator: BBS Site Services
- Acoustic design: Sandy Brown ICT Tim Vaughan
- Access design: David Bonnett Associates
- Conservation: Caroe Architecture
- Archaeologist: Museum of London Archeology
- Building control: Assent Building Control
- Graphic design : Polimekanos
- Contractor: Coniston Joiner Icklesham
- CAD software used: Vectorworks