Niall McLaughlin has spoken on the themes surrounding two of the practice’s recent projects, the Athletes‘ Housing for the London Olympics and the Bishop Edward King Chapel in Oxfordshire, at an event hosted by the Building Centre in London. The evening was entitled “Concrete Elegance – Exploring Light and Spatial Creativity.”
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.