Whitehead and Parkin Architects is an RIBA Chartered Practice in Sheffield. We design commercial and domestic spaces, including creative workspaces, commercial interiors, offices, industrial workspaces, homes and housing. Our work includes new-build and refurbishment projects.
We love to get ‘under the skin’ to help our clients get the most out of their projects. As a small practice we give individual care and attention to each project whatever its size, bringing our technical expertise from our experience of large complex buildings.
Green design and low energy use is at the heart of our approach to sustainable place making. Our innovative projects have been finalists in several national and international design competitions. We have extensive experience of reducing energy use in existing buildings as well as making them more comfortable and improving users well-being without sacrificing good design, underpinned by graduating from the AECB CarbonLite Retrofit training programme.
Integrating buildings with gardens, landscape design and townscapes underpins our projects and as qualified garden designers we offer in-house fully integrated or stand-alone garden and external space design.
Sheffield
South Yorkshire
S1 2BX
United Kingdom
Liverpool City Region/Liverpool Architecture Festival open competition: shortlisted finalist
Townscape: A terraced townhouse integrated with its urban site, providing an economic and repeatable solution and allows easy insertion into existing streetscapes as well as new areas. The sloped roofs and location of winter gardens to front or rear can suit any street orientation while maintaining optimum solar orientation.
Each home has a highly adaptable layout to take into account many different lifestyles or tenancies. A robust, simple structure allows for unforeseen changes and adaptations over each home’s lifetime.
A biophilic design approach is adopted, maintaining a close physical connection between the interiors and outdoor spaces at every floor, high levels of daylighting and natural ventilation. Integrated external spaces include south facing glazed winter gardens, planted balconies, green walls and biodiverse roofs.
The reconfiguration of the first floor of Cooper Buildings in the Sheffield Cultural Industries Quarter for Sheffield Technology Parks to provide new co-working and incubator spaces for emerging technology firms. The existing subdividing partitions and suspended ceilings were removed to reveal the character of the existing building and open up the whole building width. The new fit-out comprises a series of new insertions to create a variety of co-working lounge areas with full height glazed screens increasing connectedness and maximising natural daylighting. The modern palette of natural materials with vibrant highlight colours complements both the existing building and the new use.
We’re currently designing further refurbishment and extension projects for the site, including space planning individual offices, creating less traditional working spaces to suit new ways of working and the design of an ultra-low energy, timber framed, natural ventilated new extension.
The Supergreen Workplace is a prototype working environment designed with an optimised passive natural ventilation strategy combined with extensive external and internal planting used to naturally control air quality and enhance users wellbeing by increased connection with nature.
As well as reducing urban heat island effect, providing reduced rainwater discharge and increasing biodiversity, green facades can significantly improve air quality which is very important for a successful natural ventilation strategy. Planting can result in significant local reductions in the concentration of airborne particulate matter both when the plants are internal and when external on green facades.
The vegetation is specified to relate to the orientation of each elevation and extensive internal planting is also used to provide internal humidification and improve general wellbeing.