Collected Volumes

‘Collected Volumes’ jointly published by Solidspace and Fifth Man is a collection of essays that tells the story of 81-87 Weston Street, featuring essays by Roger Zogolovitch, Simon Allford and writers Alan Powers, Hank Dittmar and Owen Hopkins.

81-87 Weston Street’s collected volumes are the most recent iteration of a strand of thinking which has lasted almost 15 years. Guided by a belief that, by placing volume at the centre of the design, living spaces which are modest in plan can become extraordinary in experience, Solidspace has explored split- section living across a range of building scales and with a growing circle of architects and designers.

The project at Weston Street is also the product of slow architecture, evolved via setbacks and breakthroughs, at different sites and scales but always out of a long and creative partnership between developer and designer. Delays to the programme are not always welcome, but offer the space to tune a design and time for the finished building to be crafted rather than constructed.

While a small-scale, finely tailored development such as Weston Street can in no way solve our current housing crisis, its story – as outlined in the ‘collected volumes’ of this book – demonstrates how engaging intelligently with the fixed constraints of a gap site can result in imaginative development that responds to both the urban landscape and a new generation of users.