Mitchell Taylor Workshop

THE BLACK BOOK - BUILT WORKS

Design, Listen, Interpret, Discuss, Make, Progressive

Mitchell Taylor Workshop are an award winning architectural practice based in Bath, founded in 2002, and have been described as one of the ‘freshest and most inspired’ practices today. Instead of being motivated by a predetermined stylistic sensibility, our objective is always to engage fully with our client’s aspirations and the rich tapestries of site and brief.

Extraordinary

A design led practice with a focus on producing extraordinary places, spaces and buildings. The Practice delivers high quality buildings, creating enduring places for people and for the future.

Service

Client focus and a professional service are at the core of how the practice delivers projects with a desire to help our clients to realise and get the very best from their projects, regardless of scale. Between the directors there is 35 years experience in leading projects including education, resi-dential, commercial, health and culture.

Collaboration

Our working methods are based around collaboration, exploration and collective discussion. We believe that ideas are developed more effectively by engaging positively with our clients, users, studio, and the wider design team.

Develop, Create, Advise, Manage, Deliver

Awards

We have a proven track record of completing interesting, creative and successful buildings and are widely published. We have received critical acclaim and have been awarded; most notably Architect of the Year Award finalists for 2011, 2012 and 2013, RIBA award winners 2007, RIBA design excellence award winners 2012, and RIBA sustainability award winners 2007.

Surprise

We share the belief that engaging with the architectural process at all levels, from the philosophical to the practical, contributes in producing buildings and places that are considered and layered in their response; an architecture to surprise and delight.

Making

We have an interest and experience in the tectonic of buildings, finding poetry through the use of materials. We produce natural and sustainable buildings through use of a super-insulated building envelope that utilizes high quality daylight and a simple natural ventilation strategy. The materials we use are ethically sourced and help to make high performing environments for longevity and use. The principles associated with sustainability run through all we do, starting with cycling to work and ending with exciting buildings with low running costs.

Difference

Our projects are the result of a careful, detailed analysis and understanding of the specifics of the brief and the client aspirations, producing an architecture that makes a difference.

Kings CollegeLibraryMitchell Taylor Workshop

The new library and classrooms at Kings College, Taunton are the result of working closely with the school to develop a brief and a design for a learning environment that meets the challenges of a contemporary education. The design was born in part from the sustainability agenda that aimed to minimise the energy utilised in running the building with internal volumes that encourage stack effect natural ventilation, a super insulated shell and the use of natural recyclable materials. The witches hat roof form presents roof lights to the north thus introducing indirect natural daylight to the library and classrooms. The challenge of working alongside the mid nineteenth century Grade II listed buildings constructed of sandstone was met with the decision to use a mix of four bricks and a lime mortar that reflects the texture and character of the original stone walls. The building was described by the Bursar as a ‘stunning’ addition to the school’s estate and in the words of the librarian will provide the opportunity to significantly increase the examination grades of the pupils and the enjoyment of the learning experience.

Mitchell Taylor Workshop’s “commitment to producing a high quality end product is unquestionable”

Kings College Bursar Alan Prosser

AWARDS Architect of the Year Award Education Sector 2011- FinalistArchitect of the Year 2012 - SubmissionBrick Awards - Best Education Building - ShortlistedRIBA Awards - RIBA South West Excellence

in Architecture Award 2012 - Winner

FEATUREDArchitect’s JournalBuilding DesignArchDaily

DETAILS Completed: May 2011Contract: JCT Intermediate FormValue: £2,250/sq.mDuration: 48 weeks

RIBA Award Winner 2012Ground Floor Plan

First Floor Plan

Section

Pangbourne CollegeMusic and ICT FacilitiesMitchell Taylor Workshop

The Communications Building at Pangbourne College combines a music school and ICT facilities together under one roof and is the first stage in the rationalisation of the school campus, rendering redundant ageing buildings that are to be demolished as part of a larger masterplan for the site that came out of an academic space audit. The music hall is clad in Metal Mesh and the ICT facilities in timber. The composition of the building volume responds to its immediate site context and closes a courtyard bounded by the main assembly hall, library and classrooms.

The building provides a recital hall, music teaching rooms, classrooms and an ICT suite with a drop in centre, bringing music, information technology and the performing arts together.

The building has “galvanised attitudes towards learning......but more significantly the excitement and enthusiasm of pupils has elevated the place of music in the school. If I could bottle that excitement I would”

Pangbourne College Head Teacher Thomas Garnier

DETAILS Completed: May 2012Cost: £1.5mContract: Traditional JCT 05 Value: £1,875/sq.mDuration: 45 weeks

Section

Ground Floor Plan

Room 13Room 13Mitchell Taylor Workshop

Iconic new highly sustainable RIBA Award winning community art studio in the most deprived part of the south west, voted the #1 modern architectural wonder in the South West by Venue Magazine. Room 13 was designed by Mitchell Taylor Workshop through a process of intense community and user consultation, and is, in the words of Nicholas Serota “The most important model for art education we have in the UK. Venue Magazine said: ‘it instantly warmed my heart, and reminded me that more than anything, architecture is about people’.

Users have described the experience of being in the building as:

‘.. Hugely Inspiring .. it transforms me to another world of sanctuary and inspiration’

AWARDS RIBA Award - WINNERRIBA Town and Country Awards - Sustainability Award WINNERSRICS Awards - Building of the Year Award - StortlistedBBC Best Public Building Award - Shortlisted

FEATUREDArchitect’s JournalBuilding DesignRIBA JournalSketch - Public Buildings Venue Magazine

DETAILS Completed: February 2008Contract: JCT Intermediate FormValue: £1,140/sq.mDuration: 26 weeks

“... A world first, changing the lives of kids for the better”

“.. Hugely Inspiring .. it transforms me to another world of sanctuary andinspiration”

Section

Ground Floor Plan

RiverpointMixed UseMitchell Taylor Workshop

The Riverpoint development makes use of a highly restricted site in a world heritage site in central Bath to provide a new health centre, a new martial arts ‘Dojo’ and housing.

There is a restriction on the site in that a main Wessex Water sewer runs through it and in theory prohibits development over or within 3 metres. This was at odds with the clients need for close to 700m² of accommodation on the site, and thus creative ways had to be found to get the density on the site by cantilevering areas of the buildings over the sewer, and over the adjoining land and river. Intense negotiations were required to achieve this.

The design principles are that the houses occupy the most valuable area of the site - the riverside, meaning the clinic, which had to be on the ground floor, is pushed to the back of the site, which generated its unusual split section where the treatment rooms are top lit/vented.

FEATUREDArchitecture TodayBuilding DesignArchitects JournalRiba JournalArchDailyAJ

DETAILSMixed UseCompleted: April 2012Contract: JCT Intermediate Form ICD05Value: £1.4mContractor - Pollards

“a remarkable piece of mixed-use design..........All involved with the project should be applauded for producing something as intriguing and inspiring as the final result is” Bath Life Matt Clay

Mitchell Taylor WorkshopRiverpoint.Bath, UK.

The Riverpoint development makes use of a highly restricted site in a world heritage site in central Bath to provide a new health centre, a new martial arts ‘Dojo’ and housing. There is a restriction on the site in that a main wessex water sewer runs it and in theory prohibits development over or within 3 metres. This was at odds with the clients need for close to 700m2 of accommodation on the site, and thus creative ways had to be found to get the density on the site by cantilevering areas of the building over the sewer, and over the adjoining land and river.

Proposed section.

Proposed ground floor plan.

View across river. House interior.Elevation

Ground Floor Plan

AWARDS RIBA award submission 2010Architect of the Year award 2012 - Submission

FEATUREDArchDailyArchitect’s JournalBuilding DesignArchicree (France)

Badminton Boarding HouseSanderson HouseMitchell Taylor Workshop

Sanderson House, for Badminton School, is a new, purpose built 94 place boarding House, on a highly constrained site in a Conservation Area in Bristol. The project, which has a green roof and is clad in untreated Siberian Larch (which has a 75 year maintenance free life span), is highly sustainable, superinsulated, and heated by an extremely efficient Combined Heat and Power Plant capable of providing heat and hot water to this building and others on the school campus.

Mitchell Taylor Workshop were commissioned in 2006, and spent the initial period of the appointment carrying out feasibility study options to determine the optimum location for the building, which was completed on time, and on budget (£2,800,000) in September 2008.

DETAILS Completed: August 2008Contract: JCT Intermediate FormValue: £1,550/sq.mDuration: 56 weeks

“... A triumph”Architects Journal

Elevation

Ground Floor Plan

Colerne SchoolDining HallMitchell Taylor Workshop with Charley Brentnall

The project was used as an education vehicle for a school in Colerne. The dining hall is part of a wider initiative concerned with growing and producing local healthy food and its design and construction were the result of a series of educational workshops held by the architects at the school.

DETAILS Completed: August 2011Contract: JCT Minor WorksValue: £180kDuration: 16 weeks

AWARDSArchitect of the Year Award2012 - Submission

FEATUREDArchitects Journal

Section

“It is extraordinary to see the creative energies that can be unleashed”Architects Journal - 31 March 2011

Ground Floor Plan

Big Shed Assembly WorkshopMitchell Taylor Workshop

Hooke Park is a 350 acre working forest located in the west Dorset area of outstanding natural beauty. The new 500m² workshop building for the Architectural Association was completed earlier this year, using roundwood from the Hooke Park forest.

The design team created a building that prototypes innovative timber constructional techniques to minimise the use of steel in the building.

FEATUREDBuilding DesignArchitects Journal

DETAILS Completed: February 2008Contract: JCT Intermediate FormValue: £1,140/sq.mDuration: 26 weeks

Ground Floor Plan Elevation Components

Elevations

Swanage RecyclingHousehold Recycling CentreMitchell Taylor Workshop

The client for the new recycling centre wanted a high quality exemplar scheme that would respect its setting in the AONB of the Isle of Purbeck.

The scheme design was driven by the user experience and the sloping site is used to full effect to allow easier access to the recycling containers for all via its split level detail. Despite its size and necessarily robust materials the scheme has a positive visual impact on its setting due to the design for local recycled stone walling held within gabion cladding baskets. The canopied pavilions on the upper level create a unified design that contains the clutter of the necessary recycling containers.

The scheme also has ecology and reduced environmental impact at the heart of its design and the building incorporates habitats for bats and nesting birds. The successes of the scheme have been in the positive reaction from the public users.

AWARDSShortlisted - RIBA Awards

DETAILS Completed: December 2011 Cost: £2.8mContract: Traditional JCT 05

Ground Floor Plan

Section

Horsden Road3 New HousesMitchell Taylor Workshop

The design for the site was primarily a reaction to adjacent larger scale development in the area where ubiquitous ‘noddy box’ developer housing is the standard bland variety with no sense of place or scale. The scheme design evolved to make careful use of the whole site and to free up external garden and play space. The buildings press against an existing boundary wall and steal light from above. The building was designed in detail to use available local materials, of a high quality, that could be easily assembled. The whole scheme was built by three skilled builders, finished in high quality natural locally relevant materials, in a period of 6 months for a sum of £180k. This is extraordinarily efficient for this scale of building. The intention was to re-invent the vernacular developer housing standard and the scheme shows the way forward for providing good quality efficient housing.

Section

“A residential project completed for less than £70,000 per house”bdonline.co.uk

Ground Floor Plan

AWARDS RIBA Award 2012 - Finalist AJ Small Projects - Shortlisted

FEATUREDArchitect’s JournalBD

DETAILS Completed: May 2011Cost: £180,000Contract: Traditional JCT 05

Pangbourne CollegeBoarding HouseMitchell Taylor Workshop

The new boarding house at Pangbourne College provides 47 bed boarding and two houses wrapped around two new garden courtyards.

The L-shaped plan turns along the existing woodland edge and contains a new garden for the girls at the entrance as well as a private courtyard garden at the rear. The building offers a new façade to the College parade ground that reflects the quality brickwork used on the C19th Devitt house and then unpeels to use a textured timber cladding as the building moves away towards the woodland.

The building succeeds in creating a light and airy atmosphere by use of large opening windows coupled with rooflights and discreet sun-pipes as a simple daylight and natural ventilation strategy. The steel frame structure provides support for the external cladding and floors and deep insulation wraps up the envelope to provide a sustainable building with a very stable thermal environment. The building uses Passivhaus standards as the basis of the design and will take very little heating.

DETAILS Completed: September 2012Contract: JCT Intermediate FormCost: £2.5m

Mitchell Taylor Workshop “design with flair whilst still producing buildings that are efficient to construct”

Pangbourne College Estates Bursar Matthew Prior

First and Second Floor Plans

Elevation

Starfall FarmFarmhouse ExtensionMitchell Taylor Workshop

Alterations and additions to Starfall Farm were highly constrained by restrictive green belt policies and an extremely conservative planning committee. The client had deemed the existing 1960s extension must stay, and the key strategy was to find a material language that allowed the unusualness of the existing building to be enhanced, whilst also wrapping seamlessly round a new extension.

There is complete transparency where you cook, with sliding glass screens that disappear into the walls allowing a sense of the valley side to run through the site and allow you to feel as if you are cooking outside but then other openings are more selective.

DETAILS Completed: June 2011Cost: £230,000Contract: Traditional JCT 05

AWARDS RIBA Award - Shortlisted

FEATUREDArchitect’s JournalBuilding DesignHome and GardenArchDaily

Ground Floor Plan

South Elevation

West Elevation

MITCHELL TAYLOR WORKSHOP LTDWharf Studio, Widcombe HillBath, BA1 6AA01225 789033www.mitchelltaylorworkshop.co.uk