We’ve been refining various aspects of the East Quay scheme at Watchet, Somerset for the Onion Collective CIC, including the ‘Walk to the Sky’ lookout tower which contains studios for visitors and resident artists to stay in, and a publicly accessible series of lookout platforms. It is a kind of vertical pier – in a coastal landscape rich with the history of existing whimsical coastal structures including Clevedon Pier and Burnham on Sea. Read more about the Onion Collective’s plans for Watchet here.
Watchet – Lookout Tower
Planning Approval
Really pleased to get a consent for this today, in the South Downs National Park.
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.
Great Court
Film shoot today at the Great Court of the British Museum where the Germany: Memories of a Nation show is on. I remember the engineer of the roof – Chris Williams telling me how each pane of glass was different. I’ve always been a little suspicious of Norman Foster’s Coldplay-esque corporate architecture which is full of empty gestures and lacks any real desire to go beyond a simple technical solution, but actually, I’d forgotten how much I liked this roof – which is a real technical feat. It is a big span steel glazed roof in the tradition of one of Brunel’s railway sheds. I still think Foster represents too much of which scares me in architecture: uncritical practice. As a colleague of mine once said: History won’t be kind to Foster. Nice ’53 Vee-Dub though.