Cancer Care Centre

The scheme proposes to provide space that facilitates the administration of palliative care . It also sought to provide access to information for suffers and thier families, as well as those recently bereaved to still receive support.

The scheduling of accommodation therefore was key; with access to external spaces being essential. Subsequently any movement around the building had to be safe and understandable with light wells and vistas taking away any clinical edge.

[De]Masterplan

Master planning schemes are all too often looked from a plan perspective. Instead, this project gave our group the opportunity to investigate the many dimensional qualities of a large site. We were encouraged not to pursue stereotypical remedies synonymous with planning.

With high unemployment rates and inadequate school facilities our site of Vauxhall and Kirkdale is one of the poorest boroughs in Liverpool and the UK. Subsequently such degradation catalysed reform in the early 1990’s were many tenement houses were removed with new estates built in their place. Such places, though run down in nature, provided homes for many generations of migrant families. The result was a loss of a rich heritage and consequently the re development resulted in an eradication of the one thing that Vauxhall was affluent in – community.

Our proposed interventions looked to bridge the fractured communities by reinstalling the historic resonance of the area. To do this an investigation of significant historic nodes was proposed. This allowed an abstraction of the plan and the manifestation of a 4D matrix that portrayed critical intersections of time – past, present and future.

Our base concept therefore facilitated an original approach to the de master planning exercise. Our proposed interventions looked to introduce a verticality, thus appropriating an anchorage of Vauxhall and Kirkdale within the Liverpool skyline and its very fabric once more.

Detail Design

This project aimed to address issues of design beyond concept. The brief was to establish groups and choose one cancer care centre project to detail. The project we chose looked to address the internal and external relationship of the site. This enabled us to apply environmentally conscious design details and materials, while at all times considering the users.

A particularly successful design element was the hanging deck that 'floated' between two structural walls. The juxtaposition of lightweight and dense construction provided a physical contrast descriptive of the nature of care. 

This project also provided opportunity for the application of natural ventilation, water and energy recovery strategies. These technologies are becoming an increasing part of the design process and to research such strategies has provided an essential base understanding.

Digital Reality

Through the installation of road networks and the Mersey tunnel entrance, Vauxhall and Kirkdale was resubjugated. Such networks were the perceived life blood of capital which at the time was society’s primary concern.

The desire for capital meant areas like Vauxhall degraded rapidly through their isolation. To address this I proposed to introduce a media outlet that was dystopian to the antiquated library archetype, as arguably near future environments will no longer possess the physical presence of books. As the digital age moves further towards storage and categorisation, the need for paper copies will subsequently be removed. And as today the younger generations are ever more technically motivated by consumer paraphernalia, my intervention was a proposed digitised hub.

The intervention looked to continue the ideas of height and scale as well as bridging previously determined isolated elements which it sought to re-appropriate. I believed it necessary for the intervention to posses an architectural language informed by our masterplan theology and internal volumes be intrinsic to facilitate an understanding of materials downloaded.

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Summer Workshop 2009
During fourth year I applied to take part in a workshop that proposed to teach and examine the effects of the moving image in an architecture.

The course ran for two weeks and was funded by the EU. It included students from Talin Estonia, the University of Porto Portugal, the Universities of Cambridge and Liverpool.

For more details please see the website http://www.liv.ac.uk/lsa/cinemarchitecture/

Polyark

Introduction
The brief was for a Rolling Stock Graveyard Foundry. This is a place where sculptors and artists use the medium of recycled trains and railway components as a process to produce art. Centred around the foundry and sculpture workshops are the various spaces necessary for the process of, scrapping, breaking and recycling the by products of the railway. A drop in centre and associated public gallery spaces portray the art and sculptures produced by this process. The centre gives artists a range of live/work units, residential units and workshops.

PolyArk
This project is part of a national cooperation between a group of Architecture Schools and mediated through the RIBA called the PolyArk project; please see the website www.polyark.org for more details.

Aspiration
Our intentions were to explore the site mediated by the transitory nature of railways and the displaced relics of rolling stock within its gritty urban setting. The process of recycling and the creation of new and found objects, within a gallery environment, describe a physical and alchemic journey. Hopefully we produced a project of movement, spatial transitions and the passing of time.

Site
The site is in Edge Hill, to the east of the main university of Liverpool campus. The main line railway into Lime Street Station splits the site in two and lies below ground level within a cutting. The site is bordered by and shares land with The Williamsons Tunnels - a most curious place.

Fluvial City

Introduction
Liverpool's existence is empirical to the River Mersey. Every year up to 3 million tonnes of sediment is dredged from this estuary. Subsequent research on sediment extraction from estuaries implies that much may be refined for a variety of different applications.

Our thesis therefore, intends to re-ignite an identity by harnessing and capitialising the raw tidal energy of the Mersey. All in an effort to facilitate the extraction of its inherent properties that can potentially provide essential catalysts for reform throught their use.

Aspiration
Our belief is that regeneration is a term mis-appropriated much like masterplanning, as with both a tendency arises to view things from distance without involving the individual.
 
The overall plan involves areas to the north of our site for extracting coarse aggregate and organic matter to the south. Finally fine sand will be brought to the Princes Dock for glass making.

The intended site for the Glass House will provide the paradigm for our Fluvial City. Fluvial is any process of or pertaining to a river that directly refers to what is produced by or found within it. Once the sand is refined, the product will be used in two facilities. Glass manufacturing to the east of the dock and glass blowing/training studios straddling the waters edge.

Our intervention will therefore look to concretise the existence of those who use the proposed facility and employ a cultural logic once lost to the 4th heighest tidal change in the world.

Site
The site is situated north of the Pier Head on Liverpool's waterfront - north of the city centre. Here Princes Dock provides anchorage for our proposed scheme as well as possessing many design considerations and constraints. In particular the proposed future development to the north and primarily the Docks edge - a conditon of deep historical resonance and significance.