Studio Weave: Lullaby Factory

British architecture practice Studio Weave has recently transformed an interstitial enclave among buildings in London into the Lullaby Factory – a "secret world" created for the Great Ormond Street Pediatric Hospital's young patients. This formerly awkward space becomes a secret location that cannot be seen except from inside the hospital and cannot be heard by the naked ear, only by tuning in to its radio frequency or from a few special listening pipes.   The project is integrated into the multi-phased redevelopment of Great Ormond Street Hospital, in London’s Bloomsbury area. It was developed in an enclave between the recently completed Morgan Stanley Clinical Building and the 1930s Southwood Building currently sit very close together. The latter is due to be demolished in 15 years, but in the intervening period large windows in the west elevation of the MSCB look directly onto a pipe-ridden brickwork façade, with the gap between the two less than one metre in some places.

"We proposed that the Southwood Building, with its oodles of mysterious pipes and plant is not really the Southwood Building, but the Lullaby Factory, manufacturing and releasing gentle, beautiful lullabies to create a calming and uplifting environment for the young patients to recover in," state the architects.   Studio Weave sought to re-imagine the Southwood façade as"the best version of itself", by creating something unique and site specific. Their new "fantasy landscape" reaches ten storeys in height and 32 metres in length, and seeks to engage the imagination of everyone, from patients and parents to hospital staff, by providing an interesting and curious world to peer out onto. "Aesthetically, the Lullaby Factory is a mix of an exciting and romantic vision of industry, and the highly crafted beauty and complexity of musical instruments," state Studio Weave.

The Lullaby Factory consists of two complimentary elements: the physical factory that appears to carry out the processes of making lullabies and the soundscape. Composer and sound artist Jessica Curry has composed a brand new lullaby especially for the project, which children can engage with through listening pipes next to the canteen or from the wards by tuning into a special radio station.

"Our design is mindful of the fact that the space between the two buildings is very tight and any attempt to tidy it up too much would have resulted in significantly reducing the sense of space and the amount of daylight reaching inside the surrounding buildings," the architects conclude. "We hope the project will inspire engagement in a variety of ways from children’s paintings to a resource for play specialists to a generator for future commissions."

Studio Weave: Lullaby Factory
Design: Studio Weave with Structure Workshop, AB3 Workshops and Jessica Curry
Program: space requalification at the Great Ormond Street Hospital
Location: Bloomsbury, Londra
Completion: 2012