Brick: Prelude
Venture House
The client brief was for a multi occupancy building with maximum lettable floor space with a restricted budget.
The design was therefore to make the external elevations striking without being too complex and therefore raising the spend profile.
To this end, the contract administrator wanted a brick that would be eye catching and draw the public's attention to the building by being ‘different'.
The choice of Hanson's Prelude when used as stack bonded with black recessed joints achieved this objective. The Prelude's rich colour and ‘vertical lines' allowed it to stand out from the more traditional, ‘ordinary' bonding of the buildings in the close vicinity.
This ‘difference' in appearance was subtle enough to catch the eye whilst still maintaining a traditional building, and the use of a traditional pitched roof with dark grey slates helped to promote this feeling.
A secondary line of thinking was to construct a building that would be ‘timeless' in it's appearance and not to be looked at in the years to come as a building constructed around the millennium.
In the opinion of the contract administrator and feedback from the public these factors have been successfully achieved.
