Located on Sumner Street, The Forge replaces a tired 1980’s warehouse and office building with two new buildings featuring a bronze anodised façade. The simple, clean volumes and carefully articulated façade recall the steel bridges and walkways that still cross many of Southwark’s narrow streets.
The form and massing of this work space scheme are a series of stepped volumes, improving the public space through and around the site, and reducing the scale of the buildings around the perimeter.
Reminiscent of the site’s former phosphor bronze factory, the façade is wrapped in an elegant ribbing of bronze anodised aluminium vertical fins. Subtly varied shades of bronze are applied in different combinations to each block, differentiating the volumes that form the buildings as well as the buildings from each other. The changing depth and rhythm of the fins add another layer of articulation of the blocks.
The development will create around 140,000sq ft of grade A office space across the two new buildings.
The landlord, Landsec, is working with architects Piercy & Co and Bryden Wood to deliver this project with a completion date of end Q1 2022.
