Sheet 00Cover
Public buildings you can read from the street.
Gatehouse is an architecture practice for civic buildings: libraries, schools and transit halls. We draw the structure first, put the door where you would look for it, and leave the frame on show so the building explains itself.
Reading our drawings
- Red is the way in
- Dash-dot is the structural grid
- Circles name each grid line
- Practice
- Civic buildings only
- We build
- Libraries, schools, transit halls, archives, baths
- Studio
- 14 Tollgate Row, Quillhaven
- Open drawings
- First Thursday, 4–7 pm
- Sheet
- 00 of 08
01Practice
Only buildings the public can walk into.
No houses, no offices, no shops. Keeping to one kind of client means we already know how a city council signs off a budget, how a custodian locks up at nine, and what a room of eight-year-olds does to a floor.
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The structure shows.
Columns and beams stay visible. If you can see how a building stands up, you can trust it, and in forty years someone can alter it without guessing.
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The door is obvious from the street.
The way in is the first thing you see and the only thing we color. On our drawings, and on this page, it is always red.
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Daylight before fittings.
Rooms are planned around north light first; lamps are for evenings. A reading room should never need its lights on at noon.
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Every room can change use once.
Floors are built for heavier loads than the brief asks, so a classroom can become a library, or a ticket hall a market, without new steel.
02Project index
Eight buildings, one scale.
Point at a project, or tab to it, and its street elevation is drawn line by line. Every drawing uses the same scale, so a school and a tram hall are honest against each other.
| No. | Project | Type | Year | Area | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| G-08 | A long canopy on branching steel trees; the clock tower holds the stair. | Transit | 2027 | 47,400 sq ft | In design |
| G-07 | Fins shade every south classroom; the gym opens to the town on weekends. | School | 2026 | 60,300 sq ft | On site |
| G-06 | One 200-foot arch, no columns inside, the ticket hall under the east end. | Transit | 2025 | 66,700 sq ft | On site |
| G-05 | A folded timber roof over a 25-yard pool; the flue doubles as the landmark. | Baths | 2024 | 33,400 sq ft | Complete |
| G-04 | A reading hall under north light, entered through a brick gate tower. | Library | 2023 | 41,400 sq ft | Complete |
| G-03 | Four gabled classroom houses joined by a covered yard. | School | 2022 | 25,800 sq ft | Complete |
| G-02 | A brick strongroom with slot windows and one tall public door. | Archive | 2021 | 20,500 sq ft | Complete |
| G-01 | Open oak portals; the stalls fold away and Friday nights it is a dance hall. | Market | 2019 | 23,700 sq ft | Complete |
E-04 Orrisford Library
- Type
- Library
- Year
- 2023
- Area
- 41,400 sq ft
- Status
- Complete
All eight are drawn from the street side at one scale. The arrow keys walk the list.
03Building record
Read the building: Orrisford in section.
Every finished project gets a one-sheet record like this one, left in the entrance hall for anyone who asks how the place works.
North light
Three glazed bands face north, so the reading room gets even daylight with no glare on the page.
Frame on show
Glulam timber on a 24-foot grid, left bare. You can count the bays from any desk.
Floor for anything
Built for 150 pounds per square foot throughout, so full book stacks can move anywhere on the plan.
Heavy back wall
Lime-plastered brick holds the day’s warmth into the evening and keeps the stacks steady.
Heat from the ground
Eighteen geothermal wells under the garden feed a heat pump; there is no boiler flue on the roof.
Stacks below
The undercroft holds the closed stacks, reached by a public stair rather than a staff elevator.
- Reading hall
- 12,100sq ft
- Study desks
- 96
- Structural grid
- 24ft
- Shelving, undercroft
- 1.5miles
- From first sketch to opening
- 34months
04Method
Five stages. A fixed fee for each. You sign off every one.
A typical schedule for a 32,000-square-foot library, set out in quarters. Nothing moves to the next stage until you have signed the last one.
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0Brief
Weeks 1 to 6
A written brief, a site capacity study and an honest check of the budget.
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1Feasibility
Weeks 7 to 26
Three options drawn at the same scale and priced by an independent cost estimator.
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2Design
Quarters 3 and 4
One scheme in plan, section and elevation, and a cardboard model you keep.
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3Permits and technical
Quarters 5 to 7
The zoning and permit applications, then every drawing a contractor needs to price the job.
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4On site
Quarters 8 to 11
A weekly site visit, answers to the contractor within two days, and every concrete pour checked.
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5Year one
Quarter 12
We come back twelve months after opening, walk through with the custodian and fix what bothers them.
05Fees
What it costs, written down before we start.
Fees are fixed per stage and agreed in writing before the stage begins. If the brief changes, we price the change before we draw it.
- Brief workshop
- $2,400
- One day on your site with your staff; you leave with a written brief.
- Condition survey
- $3,800
- One existing public building, measured, drawn and reported in plain words.
- Feasibility study
- from $14,500
- Three costed options for a new building or a major alteration.
- Alterations under $1 million
- from $9,800
- A fixed fee for the whole job, quoted after one visit.
- Full service, stages 2 to 5
- 7.5–9% of build cost
- Agreed as a fixed sum at the end of feasibility, not as a moving percentage.
- Open drawings evening
- Free
- First Thursday of the month. No sign-up; bring your question.
06Studio
The drawing room on Tollgate Row.
Every first Thursday, 4–7 pm, the pin-up wall is open to anyone.
Bring a question about any public building in Quillhaven, ours or not, and an architect will sit down with you and a roll of tracing paper. There is tea, and the drawings for whatever we are working on are on the wall.
- Address
- 14 Tollgate Row
Quillhaven - Studio hours
- Monday to Friday
8:30 am–5:30 pm - Getting here
- Tram 2 to the Tollgate stop. No steps from the sidewalk.
07Questions
Before you write to us.
The questions city councils, principals and library boards ask most in the first meeting.
Do you design houses or offices?
No. We only take on buildings the public can walk into. If you need a house, we will gladly pass on the names of practices we admire.
We are a small library board with a small budget. Is it worth talking?
Yes. The brief workshop and the condition survey exist for exactly this. Many good civic projects start as a leaky roof and a hunch that the building could do more.
Who owns the drawings?
You do. Once a stage is paid for, its drawings and models are yours to keep, reuse and hand to another architect. We keep a copy for the building record.
Can you work with an existing building?
Most of our work does. We start with a measured survey, then decide with you what to keep, what to open up and what to take away.
How long does a library take?
For about 32,000 square feet, plan on three years from the first meeting to the opening day. The schedule in section 04 shows where the time goes.
Do you enter design competitions?
Only open public competitions with a paid shortlist and a published jury. We do not do free design work to win a job.
08Brief
Start a brief.
Tell us what the building is for. An architect reads every brief and replies within five business days, with questions or a fee for stage 0.