Panagiota Angelidou

An Optical Shop for Cubitts: The Modern Spectacle Maker

This project focuses on creating a space for the optician brand Cubitts, an independent company based in London’s Kings Cross that offers ready-made, fitted, and bespoke spectacle frames with carefully designed details. Engineered for your eyes, their frames marry traditional manufacturing methods with contemporary technologies to create distinct, modern spectacles. The context for this work is two railway arches situated between the Regents Canal and Coal Drops Yard at Kings Cross, London. The existing qualities of the arches have been retained in order to clearly set up contrasts with the newly introduced elements. The design strategy has three main strands; firstly - some elements of the interior are conceived as being formed using contemporary methods of digitally based manufacturing such as the CNC process, secondly, traditional handcrafted techniques are employed to create quality joinery work and thirdly, the form of the spectacle’s structural rivet is used as a detailing motif. Research revealed that the human eye is comprised of ten layers and this informed a three-dimensional grid that underpins the volumetric organisation of the scheme. On plan a 1000mm x 1000mm grid is used to establish a 10m x 4m rectangle that is ‘installed’ within the existing arch whilst on section ten layers of 312mm are introduced before being ‘excavated’ to carve out subterranean space within the scheme. A travertine-based element establishes ground floor and basement spaces in one arch whilst the subterranean spaces in the second arch are timber finished. A mirrored box in the basement connects these two elements and acts as a waiting space for customers where graphic slogans play optical games as they are infinitely reflected. Materials have been selected to respond to both the qualities of the existing site and the brand identity. They include travertine, American black walnut, bronzed metal and mirrored glass.