42nd Street

A young persons mental health centre in Ancoats Conservation Area. This project won Manchester Society of Architects Building of the Year, Manchester Chamber of Commerce Building of The Year and Best Innovative Design at the Northern Design Awards. It was published in the Architects Journal.

At the rite of passage into the adult world teenagers are possessed, particularly viscerally, by the relative world. The body is a vehicle for sensory physical, mental, emotional and spiritual experience. From this perspective imagine the profound, mysterious transformation happening at that time. The environment is seen through the vale of visceral fascination which flips from the sublime to the morbid — ecstasy to paralyzing pain — excitement to boredom.

Could a building reflect and help reconcile this transformation we all go through?

A place they could feel 'at home' in — when the 'home' which they have loved throughout their life suddenly becomes alien — when the one place of security and protection becomes a restriction and the people you love who live there appear all too well defined. A building which offers security and familiarity, domestic in scale, but with unusual freedom — stable and yet free.

A building which expresses duality — two opposing forces, two geometries. The geometry of the site context containing a rebellious form which cuts through the site in a gesture of defiance. The site context provides a solid familiarity — a comforting brick environment with the almost domestic proportions of the Victorian shop and the Coates School building.

Inherent within the placing of the main accommodation at the back of the site, is the lack of a presence on Great Ancoats Street. The solution is to slice a link through the gap between the end of the Coates School and the gable of the MM2 apartment block, terminating at Great Ancoats Street as the point of entrance.

The form of this link manifests itself as a 'leaning' wall wedged between the existing brick containment which continues on to slice through the orthogonal main building. In cutting the main building a triangular, double height, vertical space is formed, the stair cascades up the side of the wall completing the journey of circulation, always in relation to this 'rogue' angular gesture.

The people who 'are' 42nd Street have become particularly adept at dealing with the desire to self harm, to cut in order to express or release powerful overwhelming forces. Inherent within this desire is the notion of balancing, curing with like for like, violence cancelled by violence.

There is a crack in everything — that's how the light gets in.

To release this building from its completeness as a 'box' a 17M long glass slot slices through its core — that's how the light gets in.

Such vulnerability as this must be protected at all costs, it's what keeps us straying too far from ourselves. Four steel Sentinels stand guard, they demand and inspire your attention and clarity of heart, before you pass into this modern manifestation of sacred space.

Once inside be prepared for the unexpected: tapering stairs, angled rooms, leaning walls, a corridor to nowhere — and wardrobes which are passages to the psychologically protected land of one to one therapy.