Hothouse flower: This project for an inner-city London site provides space for artists and an arts organization in a cultural catalyst aimed at regenerating and invigorating the urban realm.

Despite its reputation as one of the capital's most deprived boroughs, Hackney in east London remains fertile territory for artists attracted by cheap studio space and a spirit of communal creativity. Most occupy an assortment of cannibalized and converted existing buildings, but a new mixed development by Ash Sakula Architects aims to provide much needed new live/work spaces. Known as the Hothouse, the project also incorporates offices, training and conference spaces for the Free Form Arts Trust, a charitable body concerned with the promotion of urban regeneration through the combined skills of artists, architects and local people. The original Hothouse was the eighteenth-century Loddiges Nursery which occupied a nearby site and housed the then largest botanical hothouse in the world. Revival of the name evokes suggestive parallels between pioneer botanical experimentation and the current vogue for exploratory cross fertilization between urban regeneration and public art.

Crammed in between the urban park of London Fields and the main railway line that scythes northwards through Hackney from Liverpool Street, the site is a narrow, neglected brownfield lot. Ash Sakula's three-storey boomerang-shaped building protectively hugs the edge of the park boundary, turning its back on the trains rumbling along the adjacent Victorian viaduct. Training and library spaces are placed on the ground floor, with open plan design studios above and live/work studios colonizing the upper floor, like modern versions of the traditional artist's garret. These different layers are clearly expressed in the treatment of the elevations. On the park side, a sleek glass wall encloses the piano nobile first floor, supported by a heavy rusticated base randomly punched with amoeba-like openings. The irregular geometry of the live/work spaces animates the roof line. On the railway side, staggered brick panels with gridded projections screen the building from the viaduct. Functions such as archives and storag e spaces are placed along the railway wall, adding another protective layer.

Due for completion later this year, the Hothouse is a key constituent of Ash Sakula's wider masterplan for the surrounding area, which has been developed following a period of intensive public consultation. (The arches underneath the railway viaduct, for instance, will be converted to house studios and workshops.) Both masterplan and Hothouse aim to consolidate and strengthen physical and social links between Hackney's evolving Cultural Quarter and the green open space of London Fields. C. S.