Benjamin Wells
Portfolio
Hello, I’m Benjamin Wells. Architect - Researcher - Writer. Focused on the points of convergence between urban form, politics and society. Founder of Benjamin Wells Studio. Founder of Medium - a design and research collective based in Copenhagen. Design Master of Architecture from Political Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. The Agonistic City (thesis project) was awarded several international prizes and exhibited in Copenhagen, Tbilisi, Madrid and Venice. Recent projects include a house in Surrey, a permanent pavilion at the Tbilisi Architecture Biennale, a brick installation at Roskilde festival in Denmark, and a contribution to the Oslo Architecture Triennale. Writing Written projects include Innovation by Design - an anthology of five texts to accompany the Danish pavilion at the 2018 Venice Biennale (commissioned by curator Natalie Mossin and the Danish Architecture Center). Written work published in PLAT Journal, Blueprint Magazine, MONU, Arcspace, BRACKET and more. Experience Worked for London based architects Carmody Groarke - projects included a restaurant in Soho, a museum in Dorset, a tower in Canary Wharf and a Maggie’s Centre on the Wirral in Liverpool. The Maggie’s Centre received the Architects Journal Small Projects Award, two RIBA Awards and a Civic Trust Award. First Class BA in Architecture from Sheffield University thesis project York Cycle Station was awarded the Stephen Welsh Prize and achieved the highest mark in over 10 years. Scholarships include On Cities at the Norman Foster Foundation in Madrid, and the UN innovation lab UNLEASH in Singapore. Guest critic at several institutions including the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Central Saint Martins.
The Agonistic City Tbilisi City Forum
The Agonistic City is an attempt to redesign processes of urbanism in Tbilisi, through proposing an architecture which facilitates city making as a collective and therefore conflictual endeavour. Its focus is a disused power station in the centre of the city, which is transformed into an active organisation where the evolving project of the city can be revealed, defined, challenged and reimagined.
Awarded First Prize - WAS Awards , Creative Conscience Awards and World Architecture Awards Nominated and Shortlisted - Fundació Mies van der Rohe YTAA 2018. The project has been exhibited in Venice, Madrid and outside the Danish Parliament in Copenhagen. Awarded full marks by Copenhagen’s City Architect.
The Agonistic City Tbilisi City Forum
The project is as much a piece of urban infrastructure as it is a working organisation, and the project centres around the thresholds between these identities. They converge spatially within a central circulation core, where multiple public and organisational routes intersect.
Pre-emptive Transformation proposes an architectural strategy for orchestrating friction between two usually autonomous entities - industry (in this case the fishing industry) and city (here the city of Ishinomaki in North Eastern Japan).
Pre-emptive Transformation Ishinomaki, Japan The project spans from the scale of the single inhabitable cell to the scale of city infrastructure, therefore proposing a strategy of urbanisation which addresses issues of reconstruction and sustainability. This framework enables production, accumulation, consumption and dwelling to coincide and interact.
Selected to be exhibited at the 2019 Oslo Architecture Triennale. Winner - Social Tectonics competition 2018 (Danish and Japanese Architectural Committee) The project has been exhibited in Copenhagen and Tokyo.
Pre-emptive Transformation Ishinomaki, Japan
This coalescing of a multitude of civic and industrial functions creates various levels of public territory, from a kilometre long open plinth, through defined forums of several institutes, to intimate sushi bars where international businessmen can dine with local fisherman, market stall owners with tourists.
Commissioned for the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial, 8-23-VI is a phased installation in the 8th district of the Gldani microrayon, extending from entrance VI of block 23. 8-23-VI establishes a dialogue between the semi-private circulation space of the housing block and the surrounding public exterior, by extending and activating the threshold between them.
8-23-VI will soon transform into a permanent and sheltered pavilion for the inhabitants of entrance VI, with the addition of a continuous surface of rotating shutters. These will allow the pavilion to shift between a more private interior - an extension of the apartment’s domestic territory and a more open exterior space.
8-23-VI Tbilisi
In collaboration with Medium - a design and research collective based in Copenhagen.
Hearth House is a refurbishment and extension to an existing 1950s house in the Surrey Hills. An existing fireplace and chimney stack is reinstated and inverted to face a new dining room, creating a hearth around which the new house will centre.
Hearth House Surrey
The dining hall frames far-reaching views over the surrounding countryside, and a walled garden to the East provides a protected external room, creating a threshold between the home and the landscape. The project will be on site in summer 2019.
Sevenoaks Visitor Centre creates a harmonious relationship with the surrounding wildlife reserve by connecting several distinct buildings with a meandering walkway.
Sevenoaks Surrey
Whilst working as an architectural assistant at Carmody Groarke architects in London, I was responsible for a temporary Maggie’s Cancer Care Centre in Merseyside, Liverpool, overseeing the project from conception to completion.
Maggie’s Merseyside The Wirral, Liverpool
The project won the AJ Small Project Award and two RIBA Awards.
https://www.benjaminwells.eu
Benjamin Wells
Work Words Journal About Contact
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Benjamin Wells
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