Block Branding
Adaptive reuse of a former mechanics workshop into a creative agency headquarters. Its forecourt and façade are rebuilt as a sculptural masonry composition where bricks are cut, cantilevered, rotated, and projected to produce a form that operates simultaneously as building, entry sequence, and streetscape identity.
The existing workshop presented a condition most commercial briefs treat as a liability, a large setback from the street and a gap of asphalt between building face and pavement edge.
The design inhabits that gap rather than resolves it. A masonry intervention extends from the building line into the forecourt, constructing a layered sequence of courtyard walls, angled screening elements, and folded brick forms that establish a bold geometric composition at the entry. It frames the arrival sequence, activates the street frontage, and collapses the distinction between architecture, landscape, and brand expression into a single built act. From the street, the building reaches forward rather than receding behind its setback.
The masonry execution sits well outside the conventions of standard commercial brickwork.
Bricks are cut at compound angles, rotated off the horizontal, projected from the wall plane, and cantilevered to articulate depth and shadow across the sculptural surfaces. Each custom-cut brick is set within tolerances that account for its geometric relationship to the whole, not the course-by-course logic of conventional laying.
Multiple bond patterns and profiles were integrated across the façade, producing surfaces that vary in texture, density, and light response.
Shadow lines are not incidental, they are the primary means by which the building’s geometry registers in the street, deepening at dawn and dusk, flattening at midday, shifting the character of the façade across the full arc of the day.
Internally, the warehouse volume has been reconfigured into flexible, efficient workspaces within a reduced footprint.
The architectural language of the forecourt continues inward, projected forms, material continuity, and considered colour hold the connection between brand identity and spatial experience throughout. Light enters through apertures positioned in direct response to orientation and the movement of people through the plan. The masonry logic that begins at the street edge carries through to every built element within.
