temporary designer hotel for shoreditch

Eye catching temporary apartment hotels could be erected in the north and south of Hackney over the next few years, before being donated to charities for the homeless, as the result of a radical design breakthrough by local architect Tim Pyne.

Sclater Street in Shoreditch has been selected as the most likely first location for a pioneering thirty two unit self-catering hotel which will take only nine weeks to build, and operate for eight years, before being taken apart and relocated to another piece of wasteland somewhere else in the capital.

The M-hotel – pronounced motel - is a development of the highly acclaimed M-house, a luxurious two-bedroom metal bungalow Pyne designed with Michael Howe of Mae Architects.

The apartment units are made from insulated aluminium panels and lined internally with plaster walls. Made in Newcastle, they contain state of the art kitchen and bathroom fittings, and top end furnishings in the living and sleeping areas. The apartments, each of which has a balcony, slot into a customised steel rack, and are designed to last one hundred years in a changing series of locations..

“At average rental costs for the area the self-catering units will pay for themselves within twenty four months,” Pine explains. “The new hotels will put unused land waiting for development to good use, and give a better return to landowners than temporary car parks, an all too common use of land in limbo. They will draw the European business people arriving to work in the City’s new skyscrapers into Hackney, which will benefit from higher council tax revenues and increased spending in local shops, bars and restaurants. At the moment international business staff are often put up in hotel chains or distant suburban flats with long commute times. Temporary self catering hotels of this kind are also an obvious way to accommodate people working on Olympic projects in the north and east of the borough over the next four years.”

The hotels could turn Hackney’s backstreets into designer locations. “Attractive visual branding from fashion labels like Paul Smith and Prada will be mounted on the external panels of the hotels, sharing and promoting their visual cool,” he says. “Olympic sponsors may also be interested in this feature.”

As well as providing much needed accommodation for the growing international business community, at high speed and low cost, Pyne believes that his innovation will benefit some of the poorest people in the capital too.

“I would like to think that when the apartments are removed from temporary sites, having paid for themselves many times over, the units could be given to charities so that homeless people and couples caught in miserable, temporary accommodation could benefit from them,” says Pyne. “I believe that many large companies could be persuaded to do this. I also think that housing associations and charities will realise that units of this kind can be deployed more quickly than traditional new build, and can complement their modernisation plans.”

“The M-hotel is an innovation with potentially huge local benefits,” says Patrick Nicholson, a construction specialist at the Hackney Enterprise Network. “Hackney’s daytime workforce in Broadgate and in the Olympic Park will get local accommodation, landowners will get higher rental income, local traders will get increased business, the Town Hall will get more Council Tax, and charities and the homeless will get a valuable trickle down too. It’s a great idea.”

Pyne’s rapid assembly, mobile M-Hotel has already generated enquiries from developers in Libya and Dubai, from enthusiasts for extreme sports who need accommodation near mountains and glaciers, and from the organisers of an international sports event shortly to take place in Africa.

eco buildings in hackney

The Olympic organisers and the developers in Broadgate aren’t the only people erecting futuristic buildings in Hackney. The borough is now attracting some of the most innovative architects in London, and they are using wood, straw, recycled materials and wind turbines in their attempts to reduce the local impact on the environment.

Plastered bales of straw are the main material used in an innovative new building at Hackney City Farm in Goldsmith’s Row, where a training centre designed by the environmental experts Amazonails has recently opened.

“The foundations of the centre are rammed earth tyres, and the bale walls are plastered with lime and clay recycled form the farm’s own pottery,” says Emma Appleton. “The main cross beam of the building is made of greenheart wood, a tropical hardwood reclaimed from the Norfolk sea defences. We also salvaged a teak boat from the 1930s that has been stripped down to make the desks in the room.”

“This building points the way forward for companies looking for less environmentally damaging forms of creating homes and workspace,” says Patrick Nicholson, a construction specialist at the Hackney Enterprise Network. “The materials for a house built with straw bales cost significantly less than brick and block. The outlay for a family-sized strawbale house in the UK would be about £60,000 plus the price of the land. Plastered strawbale walling has a surprisingly high level of fire resistance, and the UK currently produces 4 million tons of straw a year more than it needs. This is sufficient to build 250,000 well insulated and affordable new homes a year.”

Strawbale building techniques will be demonstrated at this year's Ecobuild show, an annual event dedicated to sustainable forms of design and construction, at Earl's Court from 26-28 February.

Hackney Council recently granted planning permission for a nine-storey tower in Murray Grove in Shoreditch which the architects, Waugh Thistleton, say will be the world’s tallest timber residential building.

The Stadthaus will be constructed using an Austrian solid timber system with wood from sustainable spruce forests, giving the tower – which will only take nine weeks to build – an unusually low carbon footprint. The stair and lift cores, load-bearing walls and even the floor slabs will all be constructed entirely from timber. Demand for the nineteen flats in the tower was extremely high and all the apartments were reserved on a recent launch day.

Waugh Thistleton’s designers are also the brains behind the fourteen storey Kinetica, fifty six apartments and three floors of commercial space to be built in Ramsgate Street, behind the Kingsland Shopping Centre, by 2010.

The futuristic tower is specially designed to harness wind power, which will be captured on its south side by four vertical turbines designed and installed by wind technology experts Quiet Revolution. Any renewable energy generated by the turbines which is not used by the residents will be forwarded to the National Grid.

The building will also have a very unusual façade – pixillated like an over-enlarged photograph - inspired by the images produced by German artist Gerhad Richter. The external surface will consist of thousands of black, grey and white panels made from waste timber.