London, United Kingdom
Buildings C1 and D1 are two of sixteen buildings, designed and delivered by eight emerging European design practices, which together form the innovative Design District masterplan at the heart of the Greenwich Peninsula.
The buildings provide affordable workspace and wider amenity for creative industries, as well as serving a vital placemaking role at the heart of the peninsula.
Design District C1 & D1 by Architecture00, won an 2025 International Architecture Award from The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design.
C1 and D1 are designed to encourage collaboration between the SME tenant community.
Concrete external covered decks provide access, creative thresholds, and social spaces for tenants as well as enabling tenants to expand beyond their units to work on larger scale projects.
C1 is a gateway building to the Design District, framing the key route from the main public forecourt of the O2 centre to Design District’s central public realm and food court.
The building addresses both of these highly public activities by forming an inviting approach to the food court’s external square via a large cantilevered concrete slab.
A large publicly accessible staircase invites the public to ascend the building allowing the workshops, studios and office spaces to engage the public at each level.
The top of this vertical landscape provides a basketball court set within a continuous stainless steel wire rope mesh enclosure.
The robust, thick concrete slabs sandwich full height glazed curtain walling between them, forming the shopfronts to the units.
The floorplates have been designed to be sub divisible, thereby allowing a variety of tenants and future adaptation.
D1 provides a community of adaptable studios, workshops and office spaces within a secure vertical landscape.
The continuous stainless steel wire rope mesh provides full balustrade edge protection to its generous external decks whilst also retaining a very clear visual connection between the public and the workshops.
The varying floor to ceiling heights in the building, combined with the unique footprint of each floor encourages variation in usage, which has already enabled the building to be utilised as shared workspace, photography studios, event and meeting space, and more.
This robust and adaptable building has created a communal and permissive environment which encourages creativity and collaboration.
Project: Design District C1 & D1
Architects: Architecture00
Design Team: Lynton Pepper, David Saxby, James Brady, and Will Brown
Landscape Architects: Schulze + Grassov ApS
General Contractor: Ardmore Construction Group
Client: Knight Dragon Developments Ltd.
Photographers: Taran Wilkhu
