Powerhouse Arts

This non-profit facility was set up to give artists a solid platform for making work and for employment in the arts. Its 170,000 square feet of workshops for wood, metal, ceramics, textiles and print turn a derelict structure on a contaminated site into a hub for artists and fabricators, carrying the industrial legacy of the area into the next century.

The project reimagines a power station completed in 1904 to serve the expanding transit system. Decommissioned in the 1950s, half of the original structure, the boiler house, was later demolished, leaving the turbine hall standing alone. The nearby canal was designated for environmental clean-up in 2010, and the design team was appointed in 2016.

A new concrete addition takes the place of the lost boiler house, its facade answering the masonry shell of the turbine hall with a durable, straightforward envelope. Inside, exposed concrete columns and slabs give flexible workshop space. Unusually for an industrial building, the workshops are stacked vertically, with metal and wood on the ground floor for height and loading, and the trades with the strictest exhaust needs on the upper floors.