3D Reid Student Prize 2017
Congratulations to Oliver Hopwood (MArch 2017) whose Campus for Planet-Critical Technologies is in the final shortlist of 6 schemes, out of 25 entries this year - each representing a different UK school of architecture, which will be presented to the judges on 17 July.
About Oliver’s project:
Repurposing Shotton Mine: an
adaptation of a post-extractive landscape
Oliver’s project addresses the sharp
edge of humanity’s impact on the environment – a vast, post-mining landscape
in the heart of the greenbelt – and works across scales to the powers of ten.
The proposition does not seek to disguise how the landscape has been used,
but to reconceptualise it as a sublime “found” condition. There are, however,
also hints of a seductive dystopia in the landscape proposals.
Flora and fauna have already
repopulated the fringes of the site, in marked contrast to the carefully
manicured, mono-cultural earthworks of “Northumberlandia” nearby. The wider
scheme re-connects the village of Shotton, two farmsteads cut off by the A1
to the west and two massive, tree-topped earth berms to the north and south,
via the site of the proposal, to a new north-south service road and a
reinstated local railway station to the north.
The brief developed for the site – a
centre for restorative technologies – seeks to find new relationships to the
environment through a research and development campus. The complex is
designed to encourage accidental encounters between the different specialisms
employed at the campus through a looped circulation, allowing continuous
walking-talking meetings. Unmediated interactions between people and the
environment occur as the complex’s employees travel vertically between the
research facilities and earth-sheltered, communal eateries and the
experimental lab and workshop zones for growing, fabrication and testing.
In such a
vast, unforgiving, manmade landscape, the complex requires an appropriate
monumentality. Elevating the loop of research accommodation creates a
borderline-bonkers megastructure that references the revolutionary
architectural language of Russian Constructivism and Archigram’s instant
cities. Yet, there is also a considered and appropriate human scale to the
proposal with calm and legible internal spaces that are natural lit and
ventilated and have reciprocal views of the dramatic landscape.
From what could have been an
uninspiring building typology, Oliver’s project is a tour-de-force. The spatial
richness and variety is the very essence of architectural design,
successfully making the everyday a bit little extraordinary.