Nottingham Contemporary

Nottingham Contemporary Façades

The exterior image for the Centre takes its inspiration from the amazing 19th century buildings of Nottingham and in particular from the impressive facades of the Lace Market, where hard bricks form a tough shell to the repetitive structural frames of the warehouse buildings. The toughness of these facades was originally about durability and low maintenance but the rigour of their repetitive pattern and precise material assembly also lend a dignity to the streets of the quarter.

Author Adam Caruso

Pre-cast concrete elements

The facades for Nottingham Contemporary are developed as a continuous patterned surface of pre-cast concrete elements. Whilst pre-cast has long been popular for the efficiencies that stem from prefabrication, the crude techniques and materials of the 1960s have undergone intensive development resulting in a surface that has the potential to be somewhere between stone, terracotta and concrete.

Louis Sullivan

Terracotta facades by Louis Sullivan, in particular the Guarantee Building in Buffalo, have served as a model for our façades. These finely moulded surfaces with their rich and considered use of pattern speak of their material and fabrication as well as being incredibly beautiful. Something of these qualities can be achieved with contemporary techniques of casting concrete, without the intensive use of skilled labour that was required in the production of terracotta.

Hard latex moulds

Computer milling allows for the production of formwork directly controlled by the Architect - CAD drawings, graphics or even photos are translated into machine milling instructions, allowing positives to be cut from resin board. Hard latex moulds are then made, tough and flexible enough to be reused many times. The patterned moulds can be used as modules within the formwork of an individual pre-cast unit, allowing a variety and hierarchy of patterning at little extra cost.

Laca patterns

The recent enthusiasm for wallpaper like patterned elevations could be developed to a more mature exploration of this rich and fertile subject. The starting point for our research were lace patterns, with a particular reference to the machine produced lace that Nottingham was famous for, an industrialised, economical version of an older hand-craft.

A civic and dignified exterior

Like many of the 19th century industrial buildings that surround it, Nottingham Contemporary deploys a single economical material, to achieve a set of tough interiors with a civic and dignified exterior.