Green Incubator / Plus Three Architecture

One Trinity Green is a new, high-tech business centre for SMEs in the renewables sector. Forming Phase 1 of the Trinity South development in South Shields, the scheme redevelops and regenerates a brownfield site formerly occupied by an electronics factory which was one of the major employers in the town.

The building is conceived as 3 contemporary, flexible, ‘Victorian’ warehouses each with a distinctive character but bound together by a singular ribbon of elevation and a range of shared social spaces. An elevated roof garden provides further amenity and further differentiates One Trinity Green from other similar ‘incubator’ developments.

Each ‘warehouse’ benefits from exposed structure (for passive cooling), opening windows and a central winter garden (to aid cross ventilation) and a robust palette of materials (to minimise damage during tenant churn).

The design concept seeks to address the social issues of multi-occupancy buildings by creating a clustered arrangement of studios and hybrid units and through the celebration of circulation space as a social amenity and interaction space.

Completed in May 2012, One Trinity Green is one of the first in the region to achieve a BREEAM ‘Outstanding’ rating through a combination of simple, passive environmental techniques allied to a large array of roof-mounted, photovoltaic panels. The pre-construction BREEAM score was measured at 87.7%.