4 Jordan Street, Knott Mill, Manchester City Centre

Richard Morris

In 1994 the practice studio moved to Knott Mill, an area which is immediately adjacent to Castlefield. Number 4 Jordan Street was a down-at-heel four-storey Victorian structure formerly used as a print works. The brief was to form low cost studios for ourselves, a graphics and advertising firm and a photo library.

There are two main interventions - including an expressed entrance on the southeast corner by ‘hollowing out’ a two-and-a-half storey high space to form a covered porch from which the second intervention starts: a staircase which runs through three storeys across the southern elevation. It is first enclosed by three slabs of different materials which overlap as they rise up the building - the first, shining through the brickwork on the east elevation, is concrete, the second, blued mild steel and the third, rough sawn pitch pine.

The building was cleaned up, made watertight and economy was achieved by avoiding extra layers of finish; the concrete stairs were left concrete, the grit blasted brickwork was left without plaster and new copper pipes were unpainted.

In an age of “lay in grid” suspended ceilings, services were distributed overhead on perforated galvanised steel cable trays. Basic fluorescent lights in the trays provide uplighting and shed some downlight through the perforations. The wooden planked vertical loading bay slot is re-clad using cast ‘U’ section glass planks and terminates. Physical security was ‘designed-in’ with galvanised metalwork to the lowest windows and portcullis to the two entrance openings.