The Garden Museum 

The project sees extensive augmentation and rationalisation of the museum’s front-of-house facilities – new galleries and display spaces, an archive, enlarged education spaces and café – as well as its back-of-house, including new offices. Alongside this there has been a thorough technical upgrading, including the introduction of underfloor heating. A series of three linked single-storey pavilions, clad in bronze tiles, wraps around a courtyard garden at the eastern end of the building, visible from the street through the layered glazed flanks of the new café.

The space provided by the extended mezzanine floor has enabled an increase in the number of permanent collection exhibits on display from 180 to 1,200. They leave the main body of the nave largely intact, respecting the essential architectural integrity of the church form and preserving a central space for larger lectures and workshop sessions. 

The church’s northern aisle, which previously contained the café, now houses a small shop and acts as a connecting point out to the new extension, as well as to the run of offices and service rooms, including new toilets, that occupy what was previously dead space between the north wall of the church and that of Lambeth Palace’s grounds. 

Three main spaces are arranged in pavilions: a larger education space for school groups to the north; the café connecting through to the street to the south; and the smaller education space at the south-east corner. Each is marked by a taller element acting as a light scoop to the interior, and provides quietly functional and calm environments, which can also be hired out for conferences and events.

The project minimised its environmental impact by reusing and upgrading existing accommodation, and optimised the building’s passive environmental performance. Low carbon and renewable technologies are used wherever possible
he project optimised its passive performance by configuring and orientating the building mass to use the shading from deciduous trees.

The project relies on natural ventilation, which is augmented by mechanical systems to address peak loads. The exhibition spaces that have air conditioning are super-insulated to minimise energy consumption.

The project reduced the carbon emissions of its active technologies by employing high-efficiency boilers to improve the heat generation by 26 per cent. Employing high-efficiency gas-fired calorifiers improved hot water generation by 29 per cent. The underfloor heating is zoned to provide heat to the occupied zones only, further reducing heating loads by 11 per cent. Destratification fans within the nave push heat back down from high level to further reduce the nave’s heat consumption by 6 per cent.