Sill to Sill | NOTCH

The Sill to Sill design was the winning entry for an Architecture Competition held by Hackney City Farm, an environmental charity based in East London. The competition brief called for the design of a new plant shop, fruit and vegetables, encouraging applicants to explore construction techniques using recycled materials, buying in to the Farm's sustainable ethos and demonstrating the potential of urban waste as a building material. The team drew their inspiration from the architecture of the local neighbourhood, defined by streets of Victorian terrace houses with their imposing brick facades and generous sash windows. In recent years these homes have been bought up in a wave of gentrification and as new owners move, builders get to work, improvements are made and old materials are discarded. The design seeks out and reuses discarded timber sash windows, relocating them playfully across the facade of the new shop. These windows, cut from their original homes, are given a new lease of life as bench, counter, roof light, notice board or shelf, proudly displaying plants and herbs on their colourful sills and flooding the interior space with light. The design team recognise window sills as fantastic spaces on which to grow plants and food in a dense urban environment. There is an estimated 600 acres [400 football pitches] of window sill 'growing space' in the UK. 'Sill to Sill' aims to encourage local people to take up urban agriculture by presenting plants in an immediately familiar setting: 'buy from our window sill and grow on your window sill'. Continuing the recycle and reuse ethos; the walls around the windows are constructed from old scaffolding boards. The horizontal lines of the boards, laid one on top of the other, compliment the rigid geometry of the surrounding farm buildings built from London stock bricks. The edges of the boards, painted in bright colours and carefully planed, further emphasise this horizontal pattern and subtly guide the eye towards the painted window sills. Though visually sophisticated, the design utilised basic timber construction techniques and simple materials in a manner that could easily be assembled by a team of unskilled volunteers. Community involvement at every stage of the project, from inception through construction and on to use, was at the core of the team's proposal. Consultants Structural Engineers: BUILT Engineers Volunteers Robert Hindle, Anthony Staples, Seainin Passi, David Hood, Ricarda Wolf, Sara Mellone, Luke Jones, Anna Mill, Geraldine Holland, Madiha Ahmad, Garbiel Warshafsky, Tom Borsay, Joe Brimson, Johanna Ibbotson, Lilli Hoikka, Jessica Clements, Amanda Rashid, Tierney Lovell, Mina Gospavic, Nadia Wikborg, Georgina Walker, Wai Ching, Kamil Konca, Steve Goodey, James, Miguel, Chris Watkins, Jane Lambert, Dan, Richard, Hackney Laces, ArtsAdmin Make Space project, corporate volunteers from UBS, RBS, Bank of England. NOTCH Profile