offices
Waugh Thistleton Architects, 2023
74 Rivington Street, EC2A 3AY
The Black and White Building (2023) is London's tallest, fully engineered timber office building. Located in the heart of Shoreditch, the building is characterized by its integrity to material, formal simplicity, and adaptable layout. Built from renewable materials and designed to be almost completely demountable, the building sets a powerful precedent for the future of sustainable architecture.
Old Street
Old Street
The Black & White Building sits on the site of a seasoning shed used for carpentry timber drying in the Victorian era. Acquired by TOG in 2013, the 10,000 square foot space was small and unsustainable.
A statement of sustainable design principals, The Black & White Building is Central London’s tallest mass timber office.
Traditional construction materials including iron, steel and cement contribute around 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The Black & White Building is assembled almost entirely from sustainable mass timber, reducing embodied carbon creation by 37 percent in comparison to a concrete structure of the same size.
Embodied carbon is the CO2 produced during the building’s creation – including the extraction and manufacturing the of raw materials, the construction, and eventually the deconstruction.
Building with timber is one of the most sustainable methods of construction, reducing our use of polluting high-energy materials – a key method in fighting global warming.