News: AL_A unveils their second Sky campus building, Sky Central
January 4 2017British broadcaster Sky has launched Sky Central, a new flagship building at the heart of its 13 hectare media campus headquarters in Osterley, West London. Over 3,500 employees are housed in the building, which has been designed to promote flexibility, openness, ease of access and communication to encourage the flow of people and ideas across the business.
After being appointed to create a vision for the Sky Campus masterplan and successful completion of its first building – the Sky Hub – AL_A along with PLP Architecture, Hassell, Mace and Arup have launched Sky Central, a building that challenges conventional ideas of workspace.
After successfully bringing this new concept of office life to reality, AL_A were asked to continue the concept and design development for the 37,700m2 Sky Central, the largest single building on the site, winning planning consent for the project in 2013.
The vision reflects the workings of the organisation with a campus connected by the assets that drive the Sky business forward: creativity and people. AL_A brought this vision to life with naturally lit, overlapping voids within deep floor plates to create high levels of visual connectivity.
Sky Group CEO, Jeremy Darroch said: “Our culture and our people are fundamental to Sky’s sustained success. Our people want to do their best and be their best, and we want to support them in doing so, creating an inclusive and creative workplace that facilitates the flow of brilliant ideas and creativity.”
Open and flexible spaces are designed in clusters of neighbourhoods to accommodate a new type of creative industry, where the traditional distinctions between creative, technical, production and corporate have been broken down. These have been replaced with an interwoven, fluid workspace that can be utilised by all of Sky Central’s different skills and needs.
Ho-Yin Ng, Director at AL_A said:’ “Sky is proud of its beginnings on an industrial business park on the fringes of central London. AL_A worked with Sky to re-imagine a simple ‘shed’ typology as a means of bringing the broadcaster’s activities and people together under one roof in a series of modern and people-centric workplaces on its campus in Osterley.”
The architecture boasts a large triple height central atrium above the bustling 100-metre long Sky Street that runs the entire width of the ground floor. Sky Street acts as a connector for the whole building, bringing together touchdown workspaces as well as informal working elements alongside amenities ranging from restaurants and cafes to a supermarket and a 200-seat cinema. The whole building is a new holistic, inclusive way of working and living, as Ho-Yin Ng said it is “defining a new model for the industry’s fast-paced and evolving future”.
With Sky Central being awarded a BREEAM ‘Excellent’ rating, AL_A is not only pushing boundaries in creative office typologies, but also excelling in designing environmentally sustainable buildings.
