Naomi Grieve

The conventions of architectural design have long been founded upon enclosure and permanence – enclosure as the interiority of space and permanence as the interiority of time. Meanwhile, interior design is generally seen as an additive component of architecture, resulting in the bond between the two becoming weaker as more layers are added over time. 

These notions deserve to be challenged. Architecture must no longer limit itself to the making of buildings, it should also engage in the making of spaces within the already built. Interior designer must actively partake in this new engagement – to unlock the potential of existing buildings by methodically taking them apart, slicing away the excess and adding through subtraction.  

All things deteriorate, change and develop over time. Interior designers must not resist a building’s ability to dramatically adapt; by prolonging the hollow ideal of architecture as a frozen moment of completion is to impose a limit on the building. Rather, interior designers must welcome the values of transience and adaptability, and delight in incompleteness and imperfection. 

Situated in Lee Green, Lewisham, the Leegate centre is a fifty-year-old, mixed-use development that has been left to deteriorate for several decades. Described as a ‘ghost town’, with a vacancy rate at almost three times the London average, Leegate’s demise has been attributed to competition from a nearby supermarket, the neighbouring high streets of Lewisham and Blackheath and traffic red routes running through the main shopping area.  

Its architecture is considered to be uninviting, ugly and of poor quality, with its retail floor areas and ceiling heights deemed insufficient by today’s standards.  For years the cloud of depression hanging over these buildings has repressed any vision of potential and worth. However, these ‘constructed mistakes’ present in our built environment need no longer be viewed negatively but as our opportunity – in fact the perceived poverty of these buildings liberates us from the usual constraints of architectural transformation.

Rather than simply demolishing the site and rebuilding, it is argued that Leegate deserves to be critically analysed, re-thought and deconstructed as a means to reveal the hidden potentiality of the site and its retail units.  Through undoing, Leegate’s buildings are set in motion again and space is recalibrated, producing 'unlikely juxtapositions, assemblages of spaces rather than things' (Jill Stoner, Toward a Minor Architecture, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012).

It is not about top-down regeneration, but helping ‘the little man’ by recalibrating Leegate’s interlocking spaces to offer unique work/live facilities within a newly invigorated district centre.