We gained planning approval for this recently – now in workings drawings and will be on site next year. It’s in the context of an historic group of buildings and walls, and a series of dilapidated structures will be demolished to make way for this.
Planning Approval
Really pleased to get a consent for this today, in the South Downs National Park.
Contains Art
As part of the Regeneration of the East Quay at Watchet, we have been working on providing additional gallery and studio space for the successful Contains Art project – this is the proposal to keep the existing containers, and construct new studios over, with a double height gallery and new marina offices.
Categories watchet
Watchet Regeneration
We’ve been working with The Onion Collective CIC for a few months on the East Quay regeneration in Watchet, Somerset.
This is a workspace development called The Foundry, comprised of small modular, flexible workshops, a communal makerspace and studios providing visitors with the chance to see and visit makers at work. In addition. there is a new gallery and studio spaces for ‘Contains Art’ and a series of self catering apartments contained in a vantage point and ‘lookout’ that provides spectacular views over the Quantocks, the Marina, out to sea and back to the town.
The lookout is a structure that enjoys a certain seaside whimsy, and also makes reference to the series of tall coastal structures with exposed steps and walkways that exist up and down the coast.
The scheme is highly contextual and makes reference to the the fascinating geological makeup of this part of the triassic/jurassic coast. It also celebrates the quirky and informal nature of the town.
Watchet is an informal, working coastal town, and the danger will be to overdevelop – or, rather, to over sanitise it – with a scheme that is too precise and clinical. Consequently, this proposal celebrates the informal and the adhoc but effective platemaking that has evolved over time here. At the heart of the proposal is a series of small, and medium sized interlinked public spaces, that connect into other parts of the town.
We particularly enjoy Mrs Osborn Hann’s description of Watchet. She came to Watchet in the Edwardian period as she had been commissioned to write a book on Somerset by A&C Black in conjunction with the artists Heaton Cooper and Walter Tyndale and she wrote the following:
‘Watchet, that little, quaint and higgledy-piggledy town which is more like a foreign quay than any place I know of. Here the houses seem to have dropped willy-nilly from the skies, falling north, south, east or west with careless unconcern’.
House. Small. But Perfectly Formed.
We’re trying not to do any more houses, ever – as ultimately our interests are way beyond the one off, private house. In the realm of the private house, the conversation cannot typically stray into one which takes in the consequences of architecture, and instead deals with architecture as object. But, as an antidote to the bigger projects that the studio is dealing with, this little house has been a delight as a design exercise – where 2 very disparate adjacent houses are bridged with a new infill house, which sits adjacent to a public footpath that runs down the side of the new building. It’s definitely got context, it’s also going to be very low energy, and may well be the last one off house we take on.