Níall McLaughlin
Architects

ARGENT KINGS CROSS FILM

MAY 2013

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.

Link to Kings Cross film

OLYMPIC HOUSING WINS CREATIVITY IN CONCRETE AWARD

NOVEMBER 2012

The practice has been awarded the BPCF 2012 Creativity in Concrete Award for their treatment of the facade for the Athletes’ Housing Block N15 within the Olympic Village. The precast cladding panels sample fragments of the Elgin Marbles, which were scanned digitally from the British Museum in London. The scans were used to make fibreboard positives using a 5-axis router, which then became the formwork for the latex moulds from which the panels were cast.