Niall McLaughlin Architects are among six practices to have been shortlisted as Public Building Architect of the Year. Other practices on the shortlist are Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, Duggan Morris Architects, erect architecture, Pringle Richards Sharratt Archtiects and Wilkinson Eyre Architects.
A short film has been made about the practice and the design of the Tapestry Building, a large-scale mixed-use development on the edge of the Regent’s Canal in King’s Cross. The scheme forms one element in the wider regeneration of the 67-acre site adjacent to King’s Cross station and the Regent’s Canal.
In the film Niall McLaughlin describes the design influences behind the woven tapestry-like facade and places the building within a tradition of masonry buildings looking to imitate “the intensity and the enmeshed, thicket-like quality of tapestries” that goes back to the origins of architecture, where hanging tapestries were used to enclose space.