ABSTRACT
At each Aldridge Academy, flexible, modern workspaces have been created for students and members of the community to work together to start their own businesses. Kensington Creates Hub is the most of these incubation centres, based within the Kensington Aldridge Academy in West London. As the academy was under construction the design also needed to minimise disruption and delay to the main contract. The result was the outcome of a collaboration between the Education and Workplace teams at HOK, sharing their knowledge to provide a variety of entrepreneurial spaces, maximising the budget by ensuring that all interventions in the space had multiple functions. An architectural language arose that reflected the nature of the construction method, and became a theme that was expressed throughout the project. Importantly, the off-site nature of manufacture meant that quality was carefully controlled and construction limited to a pain free two-week period.
