Sant Pau Atelier

A derelict textile workshop reopened as a daylit studio for forty makers, its sawtooth roof kept and re-glazed.

We were asked to do the unfashionable thing: keep the building. The 1920s textile shell had good bones, a sawtooth roof, and a structural grid worth more than anything we could pour new.

The move

We stripped back to the frame, re-glazed the sawtooth, and inserted a board-formed concrete spine that carries services and stairs. Everything else is reversible.

Light

North light was the brief the original engineers had already solved. We just stopped fighting it.