Commercial

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Will Pirkis has worked with developers in London, Munich and Eindhoven, carrying out viability studies, negotiating planning environments, and adapting existing buildings through refurbishment, extension and change of use. Many of these projects, carried out with Caruso St John, involve transforming buildings on prominent urban sites, such as Richard Seifert's Space House in London for Almacantar, and a listed former Philips building in Eindhoven for Trudo.

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The Philips complex in Eindhoven is being developed by Trudo to a masterplan by Joe Coenen and West 8, to transform the former industrial site into a new piece of city. Existing and new buildings accommodate offices, housing, shops, small business units and sports facilities. The 30,000m2 Veem building was built in 1943, at the head of a long line of buildings for the production and distribution of Philips products. With this project it is reorganised to provide a food hall on the ground floor, nine floors of flexibly let workspaces and carparking for the wider site required by current policy, and a restaurant with three new stories of row houses around a courtyard garden on the roof. Each house is entered from the garden on the tenth floor, and has large windows in the outer façade with extensive views over the city.

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The façades of the houses take on the language of curved brickwork in the existing architecture, forming a crown of rhythmic piers at the top of the building. Along with other interventions such as a new facade at ground floor level and colours derived from historical analysis, the new parts form a whole with the existing building. This approach to sustainability is about identifying value in existing building stock, and rather than demolition, extending its life through sensitive adaptation.