STAGE TWO

Stage 2 Studio Work continues to ask students to explore the convivial potential of architecture to foster a community s freedom to interact and to contribute creatively to the environment in which they live, outside the dominant forms of production and consumerism. The entire year’s work is set in Bo’ness, a small commuter town on the shore of the Firth of Forth.

Semester 1 focuses on housing typology and terraced housing in particular, as a generative tool to explore spatial organisations that can support new forms of living and working together, those which promote sustainable lifestyles, reduced transport needs, lower energy use and the sharing of resources.

Semester 2 is informed by the material harvesting approach developed in the urban mining exercise examined in the collaborative Studio Practices exercise with Product Design Engineering students. The final project of the year asks students to become acquainted with the contemporary debate on adaptive reuse through intervening on the existing local library building, carefully crafting a tectonic strategy to reimagine the nature of this public institution for the future.

A Warehouse and a Social Condenser

STEFANS PAVLOVSKIS

In the place of Bo’ness library stands a pool of shared knowledge and resources.

The existing library premises are reduced in size and, by the creation of a new spatial order, turned into a warehouse fit for anything, open to anyone. The library as a repository is liberated from its social duties; those are greatly exaggerated and moved elsewhere - to the High Street, where their presence contributes towards a social condenser - the centre of exchange, work and leisure.

The vacant High Street retail premises are taken as found, fitted with simple interventions ensuring spatial and programmatic affordances and enabled with active objects- risographs, hearths and extremely long tables dismantled and reused due to minimal adhesives and mechanical fixings.

ADAM WALSH

The aim of this project was to create a new extension for the library in Bo’ ness, accommodating a pair of old industrial buildings that make up a portion of the existing library’ s footprint.

My design tried to connect Bo ness ’ old industrial harbour and shipbreaking history to the town that it is today. The new extension, reminiscent of a ship’s skeletal keel and clad in pre-rusted Corten steel, protrudes out towards the old quay and the Firth of Forth beyond that. The spaces created inside and around the new build aim to draw in visitors, turning the waterfront into a hub of activity once again.

A Modular Manifestation

JAKE STEWART

Bo’ness library, a hidden public space. The missing element to the existing building is its very existence, The clarity of public is not made as the library is lost in its inability to architecturally communicate itself as such. Conviviality within the library space thus needs a welcoming architectural language promoting a collectiveness within Bo’ness. Working within the briefs specification of sustainable adaptability, modular elements developed as a solution in creating a needed expansion of the existing buildings footprint and circulation but importantly to project outwards the ongoings within the building. This being phase 4 of Bo ness libraries historical development, the modular block network proposal seeks to adapt with time and not remain stagnant, providing a future development strategy/blueprint.