ANOTHER PLANNING PERMISSION GRANTED

04/01/2019

BBM receives planning approval for a low-energy modern house in Mayfield, East Sussex

We are proud to announce, that planning approval has been granted for a low-energy house in Mayfield, East Sussex. The planning committee refused the initial scheme however with some minor alterations this was overturned at appeal.

The project proposes a replacement of the existing 1960’s dwelling with a contemporary low-energy house and associated landscaping to suit. The scheme aims to retain the split level characteristics of its predecessor. Particular sensitivity has been paid in selecting the exterior materials which will have a minimal impact to the surrounding area and account for changing material appearances throughout the properties lifespan. The design features a bipartite elevation consisting of natural stone walling to the lower level and a dark vertical timber at first floor. Significant amount of glazing to the south elevation of the house will allow for better views over the Weald. The scheme also features a flat meadow hay roof with Photovoltaic and Solar Thermal panels arranged to provide maximum efficiency.

The construction of the new house is expected to begin in the summer of 2019.

MAKING PLACE – UNIVERSITY OF BRIGHTON

10/05/2018

/ BBM Architects

The work of Studio 15

Previous Studio 15 Blog

Ian teamed-up with Heatherwick Studio’s Phil Hall-Patch to direct a particularly experimental agenda with the undergraduate architecture students of Brighton University. Following a successful degree show in June Studio 15 have now released their own book. An edited version can be found below.

“Students of Studio 15 at Brighton University’s School of Architecture & Design engage in a deep exploration of materiality, in the search for poetic architectural expressions that link materials with place. This book celebrates their work and explores the pedagogic context.”

Completing its second year at the Architecture School at the University of Brighton, Studio 15 has continued to explore the relationship between materials and place. The South Downs National Park and specifically the county town of Lewes forms the geographic focus of its study. Here is a particularly rich and varied coming together of cultural heritage and architectural forms and expressions derived in part from an extraordinary confluence of hinterlands including downland chalk, Wealden clay, stone and woodland as well as traditionally imported materials such as Caen stone and slate. For further details on the studio read our previous blog here.

Preface – Oliver Lowenstein

Within many architecture departments in the developed world the current zeitgeist fascination for all things material can be found expressed across individual student projects; unit modules; and whole school design & make, live project workshops. What was once the province of architectural outriders, from Alabama’s Rural Studio to Helsinki’s Wood Studio at the beginning of the noughties, has moved – as far as the academy is concerned – into the mainstream in the decade since the economic crash of 2008, rewriting architecture’s core script.

The School of Architecture & Design at the University of Brighton is no exception, with its architectural department regularly using its geographic co-ordinates within the South Downs as a starting point for a diverse spectrum of place- and materials-related student projects. Studio 15, co-led by Ian McKay and Phillip Hall-Patch, is both a recent and one of the most intensive of these investigations into materials: a materiality grounded in place, as this record of the module’s results – and indeed, its project title, Making Place – testifies.

The choice of focussing on Lewes, the small market and county town of East Sussex, eight miles east of Brighton, has introduced a very particular materials palette to the students. A town-wide repository of the vernacular tradition, the protean haptic encounters Lewes provides, brings home the Finnish theorist Juhani Pallasmaa’s conviction that older, non- and pre-industrialised materials can act as counterweights to the experience of the chromatic, uniform surfaces that increasingly dominate building products and production. Flint, mathematical tiles, timber, chalk and local brick traditions are all found across the town’s distinctive urban grain and morphology, all the while containing stories regarding these materials’ sources, provenance and origin.

Such in-the-body experience of Lewes’ sedimented layers of building isn’t merely an introduction to the vernacular, nor the archaeology of place, but to history and time. They are bridges between the temporal otherness of non-modern materiality and our temporal abode, the early twenty-first century. All the examples of the student work drawn together within this book document these encounters, be they with flint, rammed chalk, glass or reclaimed slate. The publication implicitly suggests a next step of integrating live building alongside this formative research. In the meantime, the students’ exposure to history and, indeed, the old, in weathered, worn and time-encrusted materials, will have nurtured and broadened their experience of architectural and building culture.

Introduction

This book is a celebration of the work of Studio 15 at the University of Brighton, School of Architecture and Design. It seeks to convey the thesis that emerged out of the process of conversations with students over a two-year period: conversations that attempted to work through assumptions and preconceptions to arrive at new understandings of the material world around us.

Dialogue, in many forms, lies at the heart of this work, whether this be through the process of making or – through making – to an engagement with the environment, landscape and ultimately with the making of place.

In the chapter ‘Making’, we explore both the underpinnings of our theoretical position as well as showcasing the student work, whilst in ‘Making Place’, we speculate as to the relevance and impact of this on architecture, the built environment and larger questions of sustainability.

“Isn’t everyone designing with sustainability in mind these days?” a colleague asked before introducing our Studio to an assembly of expectant undergraduate students. He had a point, yet something niggled in the asking. Was it that “sustainability” has become an empty buzzword, the definition of which is as diverse as the definers? Or perhaps the implication that we might be complicit in educating another generation of architects paying lip-service to the urgent needs and precarious situation of humanity?

As a pairing of tutors we were curious to see how our divergent interests and experiences might coalesce in leading a studio: one a classically trained Architect with a profound belief in the importance of sustainable design; and the other, coming from a non-traditional, contemporary arts and materials-led background.

Notions and forms of dialogue became intrinsic and permeated through the Studio in many ways: from the easy and complementary rapport that quickly developed between the tutors, to the more theorised terms of “dialogue” and “conversation”, along with Tim Ingold’s further developed notion of a “correspondence” between material and maker.

Making became a foundational activity in the Studio. Students were invited to engage with a material of their choice, to become experts in that material, to understand it’s full life cycle from formation to extraction, processing, fabrication and installation to current trends in recycling and upcycling – material, in short, in a constant state of flow and becoming.

A separate exercise and period of ‘play’ followed – play not as an aimless and meaningless activity, but rather following Huizinga, a serious and structured enterprise.2 By combining close observation with tactics of contemporary arts practice, students began to make surprising discoveries and speculate on extraordinary possibilities.

“Make:See:Place” provided a framework of progressively developed briefs to support this exploration within an architectural context. Students were invited to consider how – following and furthering their research – their chosen material could be used to construct first a wall, then how that wall might turn a corner, meet the ground, transition to a roof and form openings or thresholds. Materials were to be pushed to their limit before introducing any secondary material, creativity becoming a necessity of constraint and avoiding the paralysis of limitless possibilities.

The first semester concluded with proposals for a camera obscura: a structure with, at minimum, the technical requirement for a single light-tight space. This was to engage with a particular and complex topography, our focus for the year of a gateway site adjacent to the train station of the Sussex County Town of Lewes.

Photography as a way of seeing and reflecting had become a central thread and design tool: here the design of a camera to view the surrounding townscape with the making of 1:20 models/ prototypes (a pin-hole camera as an analogue to a camera obscura), and the use of photography throughout both to document the student’s research, and through which to re-present, re-interpret and re-imagine their constructions.

In the following semester, photographic concerns continued with a brief for a new photographic facility, archive and cultural centre for Lewes, with a live client in the form of Tom Reeves of Edward Reeves Photographer, likely the longest continually trading photographic studio in the world, with an unbroken archive dating back to 1858: a body of work of international and historic significance. Working with an archive of delicate photographic artefacts brought the added complexity of meaning and time to the concerns of the Studio.

Through this sequence of briefs our intention began to crystallise: where the opening brief for the year, ‘The Place of Lewes’, brought an awareness for students of the links between the material and the connection to the landscape and hinterland from which it was made, final proposals were for buildings that engaged in a complex dialogue with their site – after Lefaivre & Tzonis, a form of “critical regionalism” began to emerge.3

This developed from what Caroline O’Donnell refers to as the “generative relationship between architecture and site”4; not only had the students engaged in a “correspondence” with their materials, but this exchange had led to speculations of an architecture in meaningful dialogue with site and context: a critical regionalism in no way historicist in outlook, but responding to the widest visible and invisible, physical, cultural and environmental forces.

We started with place, then making, but ended with the making of place.

Making

Each material has its own message and, to the creative artist, its own song. – Frank Lloyd Wright

An eternal struggle exists between the mind and the body, or between abstract thought and corporeal reality – the stuff of life and the world around us.

In the western tradition, this dissociation between mind and body runs deep, and can be traced back to Plato who espoused the existence of higher pure forms above and beyond the visible and contingent world. Plato elevated the world of reason and abstract thought, whilst the physical world was relegated and debased.

In contemporary art, and by way of an antidote to this, there is something quite mesmerising and profound in the archaeological material excavations of Guiseppe Penone (b.1947-). As a founding member of the Italian ‘Arte Povera’ group, he has always been interested in working with the material world around him, and especially with nature’s offerings.

By way of example, Anatomia (2011) appears from a distance to be a monumental slab of marble yet to be worked, but on closer inspection one realises that Penone has surgically carved the marble following the lines of trace metals, allowing these veins to become three-dimensional reliefs released from the surrounding matter.

Or take his ongoing investigation working with trees such as Repeating the Forest (1980- 2014) where Penone displays an exquisite craftsmanship and attention to his material: not releasing a predetermined form from the wood (as Michelangelo did when he exclaimed “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free”5), but working with the material, surgically cutting away individual layers of growth year by year to reveal the sapling within the body of the mature tree trunk.

David Pye refers to this approach as “the workmanship of risk”6; in distinction to the predetermined output of mechanised production, the maker here is engaged in a continual exercise of “judgement, dexterity and care”7, the quality of the end result being continually at risk from a momentary lapse in concentration or judgement when working with the material.

Pye outlines a definition of quality to identify good from bad workmanship, but resorts once more to a platonic ideal: the quality of workmanship being judged against the designer’s intention (Michelangelo’s predetermined angel). But Penone has no such preconception of outcome, only an idea as a vector for exploration. Quality here resides in the close reading and observation Penone brings to his chosen materials; the quality of his observation, attention and, above all, presence.8

The critical interface here is the body – the active and feeling extension of the corporeal body to its limits – or what Juhani Pallasmaa describes, giving one example, as “the thinking hand”9. The hand is a uniquely expressive and articulated extension, with an extraordinary range of sensitivity. As a way of discovering the properties and characteristics of materials, and in consort with the whole embodied being, it cannot be surpassed.

This combination of sensitivity and presence allows the material to speak, to engage in a dialogue or, as Tim Ingold describes it, a “correspondence” with materials10: “To practice this method is not to describe the world, or to represent it, but to open up our perception to what is going on there so that we, in turn, can respond to it”.11

For Studio 15 the intention was to avoid globalising attitudes, whether the reduction or synthesis of material – Heidegger’s belief in the supposedly unchanging essence of the phenomenal world – nor the negation of the material or tectonic form (speaking of dematerialised stone in Gothic architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright referred to it as a “negative material with neither limitations respected nor stone nature reinterpreted”12). Here, the material would be afforded the opportunity to speak (perhaps if only to whisper) its own possible and imminent becomings.

Wright continued to declare that: “Every new material means a new form, a new use if used according to its nature”.13 But this speaks to the fallacy of the modernist project of forward- moving technological invention which has only increased exponentially in the last half-century: the innovation of new materials before full consideration and attention has been given to what already exists around us. In fact, material is in a continual state of flux and transformation and is thus pregnant with possibilities.

With this approach, theory no longer precedes practice; the idea suggests itself through a dialogue and correspondence with the material: an embodied and engaged process.

In engaging with such a dialogue, the students of Studio 15 developed an extraordinary range of observations and speculations, bringing close observation and experimental play to bear in exploring and discovering unexpected characteristics and properties of the material world around them.

The following summaries explore this work by material type: from readily available materials local to Lewes, such as field-flint, wood, chalk, stone, thatch and salvaged brick, to more recent recycled and reclaimed materials imported into the town, such as slate, steel and glass.

Making Place

Concrete and time-bound, heterogeneous and particular, our feeling for place… is grounded in our bodily experience of the world. It is therefore inescapably material. – Richard Weston

Against the inexorable march towards industrialised techniques of construction and globalised supply chains, the premise of Studio 15 concerned itself with the experiential matters of architecture which have a close correspondence with the material hinterland, capturing a tectonic authenticity through making and in so doing imparting an understanding and celebration of the special qualities of place.

Through this line of inquiry a further concern developed in exploring the ephemeral ideas of the phenomenology of place. By understanding context through its landscape or townscape it was hoped the student would acquire a particular design compass. In this way they could take a particular local material and speculate on the experiential aspects it might have with light, shadow, texture, translucency, pliability or even material fracturing. New rules and working techniques could be found to determine a surprising new way of handling a material which may otherwise suffer from the banality and copying of overfamiliar vernacular traditions.

The Studio’s arena of study is on the School of Architecture’s doorstep – the South Downs National Park (SDNP). Variously we have focused on a raw landscape location or an urban setting with Birling Gap in the Seven Sisters Country Park providing the former and the county town of Lewes the latter. For the rural/landscape context the use of locally occurring materials on a building is obvious and immediately invokes a sense of pertaining to place. Avoiding the obvious is a watch point as that can lead to the banal. In the urban context there is a continuity of tradition and perhaps a taken-for-granted aspect in constructional techniques to grapple with. In Lewes there is a sense that the extraordinary qualities of materials like flint and mathematical tiles are a little overlooked with the always-been-there nature of its ancient buildings. To counter obvious and generic options, the students were encouraged to approach the materials with fresh eyes and gain knowledge and even material working skills in interrogating and speculating towards results that might delight and surprise.

When the boundaries of the park were drawn up, there was much debate about what landscapes and conurbations it should include. The result is, in many ways, surprising as it extends far beyond the realms of the chalk hills that run between Winchester in the west and Eastbourne in the east. Particularly in its western regions, the Park extends way off the chalk strata into illuvial soils and sandstones. There is a corresponding change of vegetation as alkaline modulates to acid. And yet, even in pre-industrial times building materials of the area were not restricted to these zones. The poor quality soils of the Weald for instance lying to the north of the Eastern Downs traditionally supported woodland industries and the forging of iron ore. In Lewes, which had an export industry in iron and lime-based materials, there was even a tradition of working with Caen stone or Welsh slate as it was brought in on ocean-going sailing vessels on their return legs using the stone as ballast. So, within these trading hinterlands the region was built with a remarkably diverse range of materials.

The SDNP is in fact still formulating what the ‘special qualities’ of the Park are in relation to its landscape, its material resource, its architectural manifestations and indeed how contemporary development should respond. There was a conscious idea within the Studio that the various investigations can serve as a test bed of what contemporary architecture could be within the Park. In this way, we hoped to find new ways to work with traditionally available local materials and capture a more holistic attitude towards what some architectural writers have coined a ‘critical regionalism’. As Kenneth Frampton asks in his essays on the subject, can we be guided by a “return to sources”, where the spirit of place might be captured in the conceptual ideas of the architecture?14

Frampton and other architectural theoreticians identify critical regionalism in architectures, which imbues local cultural significance and meaning through abstracted conceptual ideas whilst adopting universal technological advancement, namely modern constructional techniques. The Studio’s stance however departs from this thesis in that imported materials of the globalised supply chain, in most cases, sever an extensive experiential link to place, but if retained, can through recycling and upcycling become imbued with a sense of place over time.

A disturbing effect of the overuse of the universal technology being systematically applied to construction is that we tend to see the same plastic, aluminium, glass and composite products being available from one global region to another, thus eroding cultural traditions and significance. Though the stylistic look of the buildings developed by the CIAM architects of the International Style may have moved on, it would appear it is the globalised supply chain that has matured into a permanent movement.

Then there is the question of what is considered as local materials. It was Samuel Mockbee of Rural Studios, working with architecture students in Alabama in the 1990s, who made others aware that much of the materials we can build with are now already around us as the constituent parts of other buildings and the things we otherwise throw away. The hinterland therefore need not be limited to raw materials. The oil-based rush through what some describe as the anthropocene has generated an architecture of consumption and single-use strategies. An altogether more responsible language of design is needed to anticipate the ideals of the circular economy. This too was a theme of discourse running through the Studio.

Journeys into making-led innovations in architecture in today’s design offices are rare and problematic. Our clients are more risk averse and they generally want less variation of performance in the fabric and finishes of their buildings. In practice, it is increasingly about the architect choosing the product systems rather than the raw materials to achieve a certain look, followed by information management to manage the build. With building information modelling (BIM), highly processed and copyrighted product systems will ever more dominate the supply chain offering. In turn, a corresponding dumbing-down of the building trades will continue. There will be less knowledge handed down in how to work and handle minimally processed materials. Craft-based construction, in turn, will continue to disappear with only the conservation industry keeping alive the skills and knowledge traditions.

Modern processes and innovations in construction no doubt bring many advantages particularly around cost, speed and safety. We are asking the question though of what architecture is losing en-route. Our contact as designers with the materials we design with is tenuous and remote. Rarely do we get the haptic experience of actually working with materials and gaining that all- important feedback loop of what certain naturally occurring resources can do. There is something experientially rewarding about an architecture drawn out of making-led learning where the presence of a commercial contractor’s palette of universally available products is beautifully absent. The result draws out the elemental qualities of the materials, which brings haptic and visual delight and instils a wonderful aura of authenticity. Where local sourcing of materials is used, we are able to invoke a pertaining to place and imbue the architecture with relevance and belonging.

RIBAJ PRODUCTS IN PRACTICE

11/01/2018

/ BBM Architects

RIBAJ Products in practice

RIBAJ Website

Issue: November/December 2017

Featured: Hadlow Down Estate

RIBAJ Products In Practice (PIP) magazine have featured our award winning sustainable masterplan in Hadlow Down, East Sussex. The article focuses on Fineline Aluminium’s System 22 which was installed in both the pool building and new build house. The full article can be found below.

BBM were commissioned in 2008 to propose a sustainable master plan for a country estate in East Sussex. Our client wanted us to consider the viability of developing a derelict 1940’s dairy, retrofitting and extending a 1970’s house and a 19th Century Oast House situated next to each other. Working with Studio Engleback, who produced a parallel strategy for the surrounding landscape, the challenge was to create a low energy development from a brief that is traditionally extremely energy hungry, i.e. a new heated swimming pool with steam room and sauna, an external ‘natural pool’, and a high specification country house set in 275 acres of Wealden countryside that includes a lake and 150 acres of standing coppice woodland.

BBM & Studio Engleback came up with a low carbon strategy for this normally high carbon programme. It was agreed that local construction materials would be used, that the buildings would be extremely well sealed and insulated, and that a mixture of heavyweight and lightweight materials would be used to make the most of their abilities to store heat or insulate.

Our clients’ woodland is also the source of woodchip for the new biomass boiler that provides energy for heating the whole site. Nearby woodlands have also provided timber for cladding the dwelling and pool house inside and out, as well as providing joinery. Waste timber also forms the majority of the external wall and roof insulation. Designing a heated pool house plus sauna and steam room predominately out of timber products was particularly challenging, and we think, successful.

Local authority Planners asked that the pool house kept the form and volume of the derelict diary it replaced. However the new house was allowed to be a lot more expressive, responding to its site and orientation, its proximity to the double Oast House that its Northern roof and three story ‘light canon’ begin to emulate. The form of the roof attempts to reconcile the orientation of the building that faces South East: the roof is lifted up and twisted around to face due South allowing solar PV panels to benefit. It also expresses the main entrance of the dwelling viewed from the East, as well as reflecting the form of the neighbouring Oast House beyond. This undulating form is reflected in the first floor ceilings that also express this functionality. This expressive roof form collects rain water for use on the site, harnesses solar energy and controls natural light allowing it to penetrate the centre of the plan to express the treble height of the stair case, the north light over the living room and perhaps most poetically at different times of the day via the light canon over the meditation room.

The new house was designed to relate to the surrounding landscape in a number of ways while the pool house is broadly North-South facing with its straight-forward solar and sedum roofs. Each elevation of the house is quite different, responding as it does to orientation to the Sun and major views out towards the lake and beyond, as well as to the need for solar gain in the winter and shading from the Sun in the Summer.

It was decided that the main themes of the three projects would be the expressive architectonic form and the material qualities of the internal and external finishes as existing or as specified: a robust simplicity for a working house on a farm.

The main house was constructed from 225 solid block work finished internally with either lime plaster or Moroccan Tadelakt, with 150mm of timber fibre board insulation on the outside finished with a chestnut ‘hit & miss’ rain screen or lime render. The main wall separating the meditation room from the entrance hall is made from rammed earth taken from the ground beneath the meditation room. A similar suite of materials is used for the interior of the Pool. The Tadelakt plaster works particularly well in this warm moist atmosphere and was traditionally used in Moroccan bathhouses.

The thermal mass of the walls and the polished concrete floors combined with external wall insulation and a sophisticated MVHR systems designed by Battle McCarthy enable the internal environment to be stable and comfortable.

This focus on the use of organic materials (that ‘lock’ C0₂instead of burning it) from the site and surrounding area, as well as an interest in an architecture that responds to the many opportunities afforded by the location and this collection of buildings and landscapes, continues BBM’s enquiry into ‘Built Ecologies’ (an exhibition at RIBA HQ in 2008): the idea of a contemporary low energy local or regional vernacular born out of the surrounding landscape.

BBM INVITED BACK TO THE ROMNEY MARSH VISITORS CENTRE

23/08/2017

/ BBM Architects

New Romney, Kent

BBM have been invited to look at adding an extension onto their seminal straw bale visitor centre on Romney Marsh in Kent. Finished in 2003, the project is thought to be the first public building in the UK built with straw bale walls. It was also BBM’s first project consciously designed for demolition.

The Marsh landscape is bounded by chalk cliffs to the east and west, Wealden forests to the north, bountiful fields of grain and fantastic volumes of small stones within the 100 square miles of the Marsh itself. The architectural aim of the Romney Marsh Visitors Centre was to fuse these materials into a discernable tectonic language – a new vernacular.

Our original project brief was for a straw bale constructed visitors centre for the recently created SSSi at Romney Marsh. The structure houses an exhibition about the landscapes ecology with a pre-fabricated cabin providing toilet facilities. A stand-alone sewage treatment system with overland flow reed beds forms part of a sustainable drainage system.

Built on a commercially let contract, students with learning disabilities and local residents interested in straw bale construction participated in the build.The specifications focused on reducing manufacturing pollution, minimising resource extraction and reducing delivery distances. The heavy aggregates used on the site came from within a 5 km radius. Copiced chestnut comes from the Kent Weald and straw bales from local farms.

We coined the phrase heterogenous construction to define a design ethos which keeps materials minimally processed and simply assembled to aid future salvage. Almost every constituent part of the project can be reused and in a sense the building has been designed for demolition. The prefabricated toilet block can be relocated to a new site, the English larch frame unbolted and utilised elsewhere, the locally sourced aggregates used in the gabions and the sand/gravel floor slab can be reclaimed like a raw resource and the pre-cast paving slabs lifted and used anew.

The roof is planted with a sedum roof, a thin blanket of drought resistant plants which replicates the land footprint occupied by the building. This keeps the carbon sink and oxygen producing capacity of the site largely unchanged.

Further details on the centre can be found on our project profile page here

NEW BUILD PASSIVHAUS HOUSE IN WADHURST

16/08/2017

/ BBM Architects

Site progress in Wadhurst

Project: New build timber frame house with timber cladding, pitched zinc roofs and single storey green roof to the rear; new external hard standing, drive and garden terrace. The house has been designed to achieve Certified Passivhaus standard of performance and construction.

Location: Wadhurst, East Sussex

Due to existing ground conditions the new dwelling will sit on a one metre deep layer of hardcore which will provide a stable foundation.

The first construction element we have incorporated to specifically target Passivhaus certification was laying the Isoquick ground floor insulation. A new product to BBM, Isoquick is an insulated permanent formwork, providing both the below slab insulation and formwork for the reinforced concrete slab. This has proved to be a precise way of setting out the building, is easy to set up and provides a continuous wrap of insulation.

Over the coming weeks the concrete slab will be poured and the timber frame construction will commence. The timber frame will be sealed with an airtight membrane and complementary products, to achieve an air permeability of 0.5 m3/(h.m2) as opposed to the 10 m3/(h.m2) Building Regulation baseline. This will be a challenge for the team on site and air permeability tests will be undertaken during the construction, whilst the membranes are still accessible, to ensure that any remedial works can practicably be undertaken.

HOMIFY FEATURE EAST SUSSEX SUSTAINABLE MASTER PLAN

23/06/2017

/ BBM Architects

Sustainable master plan in Hadlow Down, East Sussex

Project Profile

Construction Time: 20 months

Completion date: July 2015

Gross floor area: 459m²

Build rate: approx: £3000/m²(house only)

Contract value: £2.5 million (house and some external works)

Main Contractor: Chalmers & Co. Ltd.

‘U’ Values: Floor 0.12 Wm2/k, Walls 0.12 & 0.15 Wm2/k, Roof 0.14 Wm2/k

The online home website Homify have published our masterplan project located in Hadlow Down, East Sussex. The full feature can be found here

MATERIAL EXPLORATIONS IN THE SOUTH DOWNS NATIONAL PARK

02/06/2017

/ BBM Architects

Material Explorations in the South Downs National Park

June 2017

BBM’s Ian McKay has teamed-up with Heatherwick Studio’s Phil Hall-Patch to direct a particularly experimental agenda with the undergraduate architecture students of Brighton University. Completing its second year at the Architecture School at the University of Brighton, Studio 15 has continued to explore the relationship between materials and place. The South Downs National Park and specifically the county town of Lewes forms the geographic focus of its study. Here is a particularly rich and varied coming together of cultural heritage and architectural forms and expressions derived in part from an extraordinary confluence of hinterlands including downland chalk, Wealden clay, stone and woodland as well as traditionally imported materials such as Caen stone and slate.

“…man has from age to age translated the manuscript of the earth into the terms of his own thought and use…To realise the differences between place and place; to observe the varieties in expression of the genius loci by noting the correspondences between the raw material below and the finished structure above the ground”

Massingham, H.J., Cotswold Country, 1937. P.3

Reacting against the increasingly digital oriented realms of architectural design, students are encouraged to engage and experiment directly with the materials themselves. Using the autumn term as a chance to ‘play’ with a chosen resource, each student was asked to become fully conversant with the properties and techniques of working and detailing their material. Then they were asked to speculate on new and surprising ways in which these otherwise traditional building materials could create new architectonic form and language. At the same time, in ‘pertaining to place’ we hope such architectural discoveries derive an intrinsic relevance and integrity with the landscapes from which they were hewn.

The range of materials included:

Brick
Caen stone
Chalk
Clay tiles
Earth
Flint
Glass
Iron
Reed
Slate
Wood

The outcomes included discoveries about the translucency of flint and veneers of wood, finding the structural rules of cracks in drying clay, and combining chalk with wax. Others studied the cleaving lines of slate, looking at Lewes through the various textures of glass found in the town, studying the quality of light transmitted through the cut edges of glass, sewing flint into fabric forms and combining wood with its own bi-products such as resin and pitch. Grasses and reed were studied for their weaving properties, fired earth tiles were derived from a fibonacci inspired module, iron plate for its ability to form hinging panels and someone even found a salvaged source of Caen stone from a railway viaduct.

Purposely maximising the amount of experimental time, the culmination of the Autumn term was a quick design study for a very simple building, a camera obscura. To make things more interesting we restricted the students to work pretty much solely in their single material (unless of course they had a jolly good reason to combine it with something else).

The Spring Term used the same site as the camera obscura, a site immediately opposite a new cinema built between the railway station and the gateway climb up to the centre of the Lewes. The students were set to work immediately on a brief for a new photographic archive and cultural facility for a live Client: Edward Reeves Photography of Lewes, established in 1858, and thought to be the oldest continuously working photographic studio anywhere in the world.

The truly remarkable aspect of Reeves is that it has an unbroken photographic archive (with detailed subject matter ledgers) dating back virtually to the beginnings of photography in the mid-Nineteenth Century and mostly composed of many tens of thousands of glass plate negatives. It is a collection of truly international significance. The archive was to form the centre piece of the design project, posing questions about its purpose, its symbolic meaning as a metaphor for memory as well as its functional requirements.

We then asked the students to come up with a ‘big idea’, a starting concept which would exploit the material qualities of the place and find links to the realms of photography and community memory. With a rich built context and pronounced topography, it was also important for the students to engage with the wider site and void designing a building in isolation.

You can see the work of Studio 15 at:

University of Brighton

58-67 Grand Parade

Brighton

BN2 0JY

Graduation Show Opening Times:

Saturday 3 June 12noon – 5pm
Sunday 4 June 12noon – 5pm
Monday 5 June 10am – 5pm
Tuesday 6 June 10am – 5pm
Wednesday 7 June 10am –5pm
Thursday 8 June 10am – 8pm
Friday 9 June 10am – 6pm
Saturday 10 June 12noon – 5pm
Sunday 11 June 12noon – 5pm