The ground floor that has to stay empty

St. Luke Apartment puts six flats on 165 square metres by going up. The ground floor carries no accommodation at all — columns and parking, open to the air — and the three floors above it each hold one one-bedroom flat and one two-bedroom flat.

An open ground floor on a plot that size is the most valuable empty space in the building and the most obviously convertible. It is covered, it is level, it has a slab over it and a slab under it, and it is the first place anybody looks when they want another room. Enclose it and six flats have nowhere to park, on a street with no room to absorb them.

The drawing is not what protects it. What protects it is that there is nowhere else to go on the plot: no side, no rear, nothing to give. That is a weak protection, because a later owner with a tenant willing to pay does not consult the site plan.

So the thing worth designing is the argument rather than the fabric. A ground floor that reads as structure is harder to convert, and easier to defend in a management agreement, than one that reads as an unfinished shell. Columns, no infill, no services stubbed out ready and waiting for somebody to finish the job.

You cannot draw a building that refuses to be changed. You can draw one where the change is obviously a change.