Without a hot sick child or an even hotter Open House ticket it’s unlikely that you will be able to experience the delightful and idiosyncratic Lullaby Factory. For one day only in September the Lullaby Factory was open to the public and revealed its secrets to a charmed Open House audience.
In 2012 Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children opened the Morgan Stanley Clinical Building, designed to face onto a landscaped square. But due to the phasing of planned developments at the hospital the view will be obstructed by the back of the adjacent Southwood Building for the next 15 years.
The hospital though was determined that its young patients would be able to look out of their ward windows onto a more uplifting scene than this dank sunless corridor landlocked by tall buildings. Drastic, or at least creative, action was needed and so a competition was launched to transform the slender awkward space, which reaches 10 storey in height and 32 metres in width but at times is no more than a metre wide.
Studio Weave, a young architectural practice headed by Maria Smith and Je Ahn, won the commission and proceeded to weave their magic into this neglected space.
The site was typical of much urban landscape, most of which is ignored or wilfully abandoned due to the logistics and difficulty of attempting to address its sheer ugliness. The Southwood Building like many old structures has built up a crust of sprouting pipes and services pocking much of its surface. The building also had to remain fully operational as a medical facility until it is demolished and so removing any of the pipework and ducts was out of the question.
The design was further complicated by the newly completed wards on the opposite side with their floor to ceiling glazing, since nothing could touch that facade. To meet the various challenges a digital 3-D model of the corridor with all its pipes was created.
From these unpromising beginnings Studio Weave constructed a design based on a romanticised vision of the industrial process. The resulting installation is fascinating. It is also an extraordinary and craftsman-like use of this difficult narrow site. Studio Weave brought a children’s story with its elements of secrecy and fantasy to life. But like all good children’s stories its whimsicality appeals to adults and children alike.
They re-imagined the space as a fantastical factory filled with sinuous pipework manufacturing vast quantities of lullabies for the hundreds of sick children at Great Ormond Street.
Instead of hiding its exterior lumps and bumps, Studio Weave created a sculpture specifically for the site. The existing pipes and services of the building were integrated into the design and were transformed into elongated musical instruments filtering gentle sounds and embellishing the dreary facade with giant clarinets and fluted trumpets. As a result the building is able to go about its daily business and at the same time has become a story book Heath Robinson affair where lullabies are collected and then whiz along tubes with tuning keys and valves which adjusts them to ensure the lullabies are soothing and not sad and comforting but not too funny (which would keep you awake). At the end of this strange journey after the lullaby is elongated into a long slow flow, it is delivered through the pipes to the sleepy.
This is all part of the whimsy that Studio Weave has created because of course no lullabies are actually being created in this dreamlike factory. The installation can be viewed from within the hospital where the children and staff can peep into its secret world and, quite marvellously, the specially written melodious lullabies are heard by bending towards large globular trumpets which are at ground level, or listening to them on the hospital radio.
What is not childlike though is the choice of materials and colour palette. The design thankfully steers clear of the bright primary colours usually daubed over any designs aimed at children. Instead Studio Weave cleverly disguised spun aluminium, polystyrene and glass reinforced plastic tubes and boxes with the low keyed hues of the factory floor: burnished copper and dull silver. The newly orchestrated mechanisms were then adorned with the bells, bridges and rings of wind instruments.
It says much about the visionary thinking of Great Ormond Street Hospital that it has been willing (and able) to commission the Lullaby Factory as part of a series of artworks to enhance both its buildings and the experience of the children and adults who use them. These artworks are seen as valuable resources for the play specialists at the hospital who help children and young people to cope with any fears about hospitals and the treatments they are undergoing.
But it would be even more wonderful to think that the Lullaby Factory could act as an inspiration for the transmutation of other unloved and ugly urban sites desperately needing alchemists and storytellers like Studio Weave to turn base metal into gold.