This established business providing affordable creative studios asked us to have a look at using entrance spaces for something more social: somewhere to meet rather than just pass through, available to rent out-of-hours for exhibition, performance, pop-up dining or party.
Working through the brief and beginning to understand the Pilot brand & ethos three things immediately stand out: material, place and community.
The sites are all ex-industrial buildings with strong physical presence and very much knitted into local community. Part of the brief is to build on this with new social spaces open to the public – fostering links, filling gaps in the high street and making good business sense. These will combine a unified approach to material and identity with modular elements easily adapted to individual sites and those using them.
For example, some units have scope for a full café or bar, with plenty of footfall and local interest; elsewhere space constraints mean something else will work better like a coffee cart or food truck in the courtyard.
Existing buildings share a robust palette of ordinary finish appropriate for high-traffic use, also making them instantly identifiable; makes sense therefore to tap into this to develop a new sub-collection of materials to complement the existing, and give the new areas their own feel.
Lots of possibilities in the mix to be married up with the practicalities of operation and fabrication; also a really interesting set of commercial and social questions facing this enterprise post-brexit/post-lockdowns. On-going.
