The helix could transform perhaps the dullest of all architectural typologies – the light industrial facility. I check out the new twist it gives to a building in London called Barking Industria.
London lost 1,310 hectares hectares of industrial land between 2001 and 2015. Light industry is quietly disappearing, usually replaced by high-density residential projects. Even a working-class east London borough like Barking is sprouting chunky brick-clad apartment blocks. Few miss the lost light industrial buildings — most were dismal, and plenty remain. Fenced off from the street, the typically single-storey windowless sheds say: ’Don’t look and keep out!’. The new Barking Industria, completed in September, developed by the local regeneration agency and designed by HaworthTompkins, has very different messages. As associate director Hugo Braddick explains, the practise set out to enhance the quality of industrial space for users and community, and ‘prove the viability of vertical industry’. The giant nineteenth century brick mills of the world’s first industrial city, Manchester, were like a model. They stacked their factory floors as high as eight storeys.
Barking Industria stacks three double-height levels in two parallel volumes with photovoltaic roofs, and a steel structure with an 8m grid. HaworthTompkins considered mass timber, but it would have cost more and sadly UK insurance companies are still reluctant about it. The exterior facades of both Industria’s wings are clad in dark galvanised metal, giving the building a businesslike look, made robust by the brutalist cladding of textured concrete along the ground level’s long street facade. Inside, 11,400m2 floor space offer 45 units ranging from 18m2 to 241m2. They are partitioned by removeable walls of rockwool sandwiched between metal plates, so units can be combined. Windows bring them natural light. On the upper level, the back wing has two single-height floors, and wide corridors between smaller units entered through bright yellow doors. The loading capacity of the concrete floors is 20kN/m2, not as much as heavy industry but four times that of a typical office. Overall, Industria triples normal the ratio of industrial space to ground plot.
The east facade reveals that the gap between the wings is spanned entirely by a vehicle yard at all three main levels. These open air environments have an optimistic aesthetic, developed with branding consultant DNCO, who also contributed to wayfinding. The metal facades facing the yards have a stretched checkerboard pattern of grey and the bright yellow, playfully referencing the ubiquitous yellow of hazard stripes in vehicular and industrial environments. On the top-level wet western edge, behind screens where creeping plants are taking hold, is a breakout space with benches, tables and a view towards Canary Wharf.
Hold on, you may say – vertical light industry is nothing new. Take Paris, for example. Dominique Perrot’s Hôtel Industriel Berlier (1990), a glass block near Austerlitz, stacked industrial floors up to level 10. But what is crucial to light industry is vehicular access – as Braddick says, ‘tenants have the expectation to drive in and roll up the (roller-door) shutter’. Until 1999, Paris had a stacked precedent for such access too. The Hôtel Industriel de l’Ourcq at Pantin (1989) designed by Paul Chemetov and Huidobro Borja had internal streets and placed heavier industry at ground level, but had ramps allowed vans to access lighter industry above it.
How does Industria deal with vehicular access? It’s time to meet the helix. Next to the back volume, beside the ground floor bike shed and two giant shiny water tanks storing water, is a helical ramp. Car parks across the world are accessed by helical ramps. Bertrand Goldberg designed both access and parking in the epic 17-storey helices of Chicago’s Marina City towers (1964). At Industria, the ramp allows traffic in both directions and vehicles 7.5m long and 3m high. It’s such a distinctive feature, Industria celebrates it in a logo, seen high up on the facade.
Industria has a strong echo of the UK’s ‘High-Tech’ architecture, rooted in the work of Team 4 where Norman Foster and Richard Rogers worked together. The practice’s last project was a small factory for Reliance Controls (1967) in Swindon, where management and workers shared the same space in a metallic structure. Prouvé-type pragmatism, modularity and exposure of structure defined the style, and bright colour often featured — for example, the Renault Distribution Centre (1982), by Foster and also in Swindon, uses yellow. If Cemetov and Borja’s project at Pantin was in the UK, it would have been classified High-Tech. Industria has High-tech hallmarks inside and out, and it’s no coincidence that HaworthTompkins founder Graham Haworth was a fan of High-Tech factories.
Industria is HaworthTompkins’ first purely industrial building, but their numerous award-winning theatre and educational projects needed technical spaces. The Woo Building (2015), their third in the Royal Academy of Arts’ Battersea Campus, London, feels particularly industrial, and its design drew inspiration from Owen Williams’ seminal 1932 Boots D10 pharmaceutical factory (1932) near Nottingham.
Behind the reception, Industria has a second helical structure. A spiral staircase leads up to a mezzanine balcony lounge where you can sit, and there’s a wall of pods for private conversations, like a line of old payphone booths in a black-and-white film, but wider. With tables and chairs downstairs, this street corner space is set to become a café open to the community.
Industria has already let units to businesses from makers of Asian cakes and lift ropes to geotechnical investigators. But what does the future hold for light industry? Evangelist churches are making inroads into light industrial estates, but God often guides them to the dullest buildings with the lowest rents. Light industry itself is changing, with the rise of dark kitchens, artisan workshops and hybrid office/design/fabrication spaces. As Braddick says, ‘the growth of the Internet has allowed such businesses to be scaleable’.
The elephant in the room is robotics. In 2019, Oxford Economics forecast that 8.5% of factory workers worldwide would be replaced by robots by 2030. Then in 2020 the World Economic Forum predicted that automation would actually increase human jobs, although not necessarily on the factory floor. Last month (January 2024) Elon Musk demonstrated Tesla’s humanoid robot Optimus walking through an industrial facility. Soon it may be walking to work. Could light industry simply become workhouses for robots? Alternatively, Industria might become a refuge of human activity, alive with artisan creatives and new-generation loft dwellings — and the helical ramp a gallery for human artistry, like Frank Lloyd Wright’s spiralling gallery in the Guggenheim, New York (1959). Industria is designed to stand at least 100 years. It will need all the flexibility that was designed in.
February 2024, h© Herbert Wright 2024
This post was published in French in Chroniques d’Architecture as “Une nouvelle twist dans l’ADN des bâtiments industriels légers“
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