A green-concrete frontage marks the transformation of a neglected building in Hastings into Eagle House community centre, designed by London architecture studio IF_DO.

Eagle House was completed for community-led developer Hastings Commons and provides a mixture of public space, work areas and youth facilities.

Rather than demolish and replace the neglected Victorian building, IF_DO looked to turn it back into an active "part of the street", onto which a ground floor common room can open via large, openable windows framed by a green-concrete frontage.

IF_DO has created a community centre in Hastings called Eagle House

"What we were really designing was civic infrastructure, a building that could hold a free community room, affordable workspace and dedicated youth facilities all at once, and do so in a way that felt genuinely welcoming rather than institutional," IF_DO co-founder Sarah Castle told Dezeen.

"Large operable windows set within deep recesses mean that people inside the common room can quite literally sit at the window and have a conversation with someone waiting for the bus outside," she added.

"The building stops being a container and becomes part of the street. In a town where many people, particularly young people, can feel invisible, that matters."

It involved the transformation of a neglected building

The common room of Eagle House is spread across its ground and lower ground floors. The upper area is framed in bright canary-yellow steelwork and features sit-in timber window boxes overlooking the street.

Above, three storeys of flexible, affordable work areas and counselling spaces for young people are organised around a new circulation core. This contains a lift and a repositioned, skylit staircase, also painted canary yellow.

Read: Thing converts historic Cornish library into The Ladder arts space

The bold colour palette – chosen through sessions with members of Hastings Commons' youth organisation – continues through the building as a wayfinding strategy, with pink doorframes and walls in shades of orange, blue and green.

These colourful painted surfaces sit alongside exposed services and ducting, wood-wool wall panels and sisal flooring, keeping the spaces deliberately simple and easy to maintain while also providing acoustic comfort.

It has been finished with a bold colour palette

In the attic, the ceiling has been clad in timber reclaimed from the building's external walls, which have been re-rendered in pale lime, with subtly textured finishes around the windows and parapet.

"It was important that those uses were not just stacked on top of each other but genuinely connected, spatially and socially. The building needed to feel like one thing, not a collection of separate tenants," Castle said.

"We wanted the materials to feel honest and durable, things that would age well and that the community could understand and own," she added.

Wood-wool wall panels feature in the "easy-to-maintain" material palette

Elsewhere in the UK, architecture studio Thing recently converted a historic library and college in Cornwall into a community arts and culture hub, contrasting exposed, worn surfaces with new additions in timber.

Architecture collective Assemble recently converted a pair of former dairy warehouses into a community centre and church in east London.

The photography is by Killian O'Sullivan. 

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