King's Cross Plimsoll Building
Europe
View Project
King’s Cross Tapestry Building
- Location
- London, UK
- Client
- Argent LLP
- Services
- Graphics & Wayfinding
- Sector
- Residential
- Collaborators
- Niall McLaughlin Architects
- Dates
- 2016
Wayfinding for a residential building in the King’s Cross regeneration.
The Tapestry Building is a 15-storey mixed-use building on the north-western edge of the King’s Cross regeneration. The building provides 129 homes alongside an energy centre serving the wider King’s Cross development, a multi-use games area, a café, a restaurant and centralised car parking. Benoy was commissioned to design the graphic design and wayfinding for the scheme, providing a visual language and signage system for the building’s residents and visitors.
The Tapestry Building takes its name from the woven, tapestry-like character of its facade: patterned glass-reinforced concrete panels carrying Egyptian motifs and op-art geometries, drawn from the architectural tradition of masonry buildings imitating textile hangings. The wayfinding scheme extends this language into the interior environment, with graphic and material choices that echo the sculpted facade and translate its scale into pedestrian-level legibility.
The building sits within the wider 67-acre King’s Cross regeneration, one of central London’s most extensive urban renewal schemes. The wayfinding references King’s Cross’ historical industrial fabric of canal warehouses, goods yards and gasholders, alongside the contemporary creative economies of design, media and education that now occupy the regenerated district. The scheme recognises the area’s heritage of craft and making while signalling its present identity.
