Lee Marley Residential Development

Brick was the only real façade choice for the Huntley Wharf project. Reading has a strong heritage as a brick manufacturing town, being described by Thomas Hardy in Jude the Obscure as "Ald Brick Ham", the old brick town. Whilst the site’s original occupant, the Huntley and Palmer Biscuit Factory, was also constructed of the traditional local brick in the classic Victorian industrial/warehouse style.

With the factory long since demolished and local brick manufacturing long since ceased, it was felt that the project should not be a pastiche of the local vernacular but instead a new architectural language should be developed that responds and celebrates the site’s history in a contemporary way, capturing a sense of place that once existed.

The Biscuit Factory was constructed in the Victorian Era and as Huntley & Palmer became more successful it was repeatedly expanded and added to over the years. The buildings were characterised by repetitious brick windows and bays, variegated roofscapes and simple, confident relationships, to the public realm with the buildings exhibiting textural bands and simple brick detailing.

The design has been built on this historic simplicity, with verticality and a dynamic roofscape being a key anchor to this history. Four different but complimentary colours of bricks provide character and allow the expression of a series of terraced forms that respond to their individual context; dark bricks to express the marker buildings and the outward, facing elevations; light bricks for the water facing elevations; mid-tone bricks for the streets and to provide transition between light and dark; grey bricks for the three floor terrace blocks on the streets.

Rather than expressing each building as an object the architect has endeavoured to allow the façades to speak to the spaces using scale, rhythm, texture, tonality and tactility to create a genuine human experience. Generally, the façades are very similar with subtle differences in brickwork features or approaches differentiating them from each other. Areas of transition, for example, where façades wrap around corners, have been explored using Moire patterns interlocking different façade languages. This accentuates the corner but also allow a more subtle transition between façade types. Shearing and slipping techniques have also been developed to avoid a monotony of vertically stacked windows that can dissolve human scale. This technique also helps create horizontally emphasised building at key locations that respond to movement around the site.

The Waterside and Riverside Square elevations are very similar with the Riverside Square being uplifted with more texture and a precast band. The Forbury Road and Kenavon Drive Elevations are also very similar with balcony types being the differentiator

The result is a new industrial vernacular that still has its roots deep in the sites heritage and history.