At present Raven Row is an art centre just around the corner from the historic area called Spitalfields, in the heart of East London. During the Middle the biggest hospital St. Mary Spital was situated on this ground. The building which are two houses were built about 1690 while the whole area was used for testing weapons.

Around 1750 the houses were refurbished by Hugenot silk merchants in a Rococo style and changed into luxury shops. Later around 1820 only one of houses received a Regency style façade. In the 19th and early 20th century the Spitelfield area turned into one of the poorest parts of London.

After having survived two fires in the 1950s and 1970s, these two historic houses stood empty for a long time, slowly deteriorating. Finally in 2009 Alex Sainsbury took over and restaurated the whole building with the 6a architecture team and founded his non profit gallery raven row for experimental artist and outsider art.

So the task for the architecture team was to refurbish the building so that the new art concept went aligned with the environment. The rococo interior style had to be combined with the back part of the new office building from 1972.

The architects used technics form the Japanese skills to rebuilt the houses, but they wanted to keep the history and all the lost stories by preserving the surfaces as good as possible.

Some of the rooms in the gallery are constructed under street level that makes it very special…They are not dark as expected, because they installed skylights at the ceilings. The whole gallery is a succession of rooms and doors, but there are no corridors.

One of the rooms was once completely taken out and shipped to Chicago for an art exhibition…the 6a architects found out that everything was returned and stored, so they reinstalled the room, so this way this part of the house is original and saved/wasn’t destroyed by the fires.

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