Winning Design for Art Commission

We are absolutely thrilled to have won the commission by the charity Allegra’s Ambition and SPUD to deliver a new piece of public art, to be located outside the Winchester Sports Centre which opened in 2021.

The brief was to design a new sculpture as a place for people to gather and sit, adjacent to the playing fields at the new recreation centre. The piece needed to versatile, to be interesting visually, create a natural gathering point, but also to offer some form of seating, and to ideally incorporate the charity within the design, all within a budget of £50,000.

Our answer was the ‘Tactile Seating Structure’ crafted from hardwood timber fins. Each fin could be a different hardwood to offer a variation on tone, positioned at a slightly different angle to create an organic ripple, reflective of the ribbons within the charity logo. The shape of the wooden structure creates a welcoming enclosure for people to gather, encouraging people to sit or lounge within, or climb and crawl over the undulating surface. Conceived out of reclaimed natural timbers, sourced locally, to create a robust, warm and durable structure which can sustain the public interaction with minimal on-going maintenance. The structure will be integrated with landscaping and outdoor apparatus, offering everyone an opportunity to participate in physical activity and activating an underused public area outside of the leisure centre. Public consultation workshops will be carried out to ensure that the structure incorporates a wide variety of uses for all ages and abilities.

The Allegra’s Ambition charity aims to encourage and empower young and disadvantaged people to fulfil their potential through participation in sport, the charity was set up in memory of Allegra, a keen sports person who died suddenly at the age of 16. SPUD is an arts and education charity located in the New Forest, they aim to create opportunities for people to engage with art, architecture, design and the environment.

Marley interview, AJ Award

I was recently interviewed by Marley, the UK’s leading roofing product company, about our success at the Architects Journal Small Project Award which they sponsor. The St Margaret’s Church project won the Sustainability prize at this year’s award, which was a huge honour for the myself and the collaborative team.

The award ties in succinctly with the founding ethos I had when setting up Studio BAD, we are interested in two things, one is social architecture and the social impact of architecture. The other is our passion for the reuse and reimagination of existing buildings. I always had a crazy idea that as architects, we could run sustainable businesses by doing pieces of work that question whether you actually have to build anything at all. The success of St Margaret’s Church has demonstrated that my crazy idea is possible!

At this project we only touched the church lightly, yet have achieved a huge transformation for the building and the community that use it. I think it was brave for AJ to give the award to a project that isn’t glamorous architecture. This award is important for all of the Studio BAD team, and is equally important to our client.

 

The full article can be found here.

Architects Journal Sustainability Webinar

We were delighted to have taken part in the recent webinar with Architects Journal, discussing sustainability in small projects, hosted by their sustainability editor Hattie Hartman. It was a really interesting conversation which looked at the approach to sustainability in two very different projects, if you missed the seminar you can catch up with a recording here.  

We presented and discussed our St Margaret’s Church project, a large community hub redevelopment which won this year’s AJ Small Projects Sustainability Award. We were joined by Summer Islam from Material Cultures, who discussed their small Block House project which focused on experimental materials, and which had also been shortlisted in this year’s sustainability awards.

It is increasingly important to shine a light on projects that lead the way in sustainability, which is something that we all understand to be important within the build industry but unfortunately it is not always imbedded in design. During the seminar we discuss and explore ideas of retrofitting, collaboration and innovative use of materials.

The seminar concluded with some interested questions from the audience, including what the process was for focusing on the heating of the church, why we choose to use concrete within a historic building, how the church is now use by the community and what we would have done differently.

A really interesting conversation you do not want to miss!

RICS Award Shortlist 2022

RICS Award Shortlist 2022

We are so delighted to have the St Margaret’s Church redevelopment included in the shortlist for this year’s RICS Social Impact Awards 2022, in the Community Benefit category.

The awards were set up by RICS (Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors) to annually celebrate the most inspirational projects that also have a positive impact on the local community, or natural environment. We feel especially proud to be included in the shortlist for this award, as throughout the church project the community has been at the heart of the design, so we are grateful to to have this celebrated and recognised by others.

We would like to thank the whole collaborative team who have helped to deliver this scheme, alongside our most wonderful clients at the church who have been so open and welcoming to our design ideas.

Congratulations to all the projects shortlisted, we are amongst some brilliant schemes which all deserve to be celebrated. The regional winners will be announced on YouTube on the 18th May.

This is our second inclusion in the RICS Awards, previously our October Books project was shortlisted in the 2020 awards.

Award Win – AJ Small Projects

We are thrilled, surprised, astonished and delighted to have won the Sustainability Award at the AJ Small Projects Award last night for our St Margaret’s Church, in Portsmouth.

The church had been one of the 20 projects shortlisted in this year’s awards, due to the high level of the other projects shortlisted we hadn’t anticipated coming home with a trophy, to be honest we were just going to enjoy the evening! It was such a wonderful shock when our project was announced.

As part of the process for these awards all those shortlisted were invited to present the project in 2 minutes! Followed by an in-depth Q&A session afterwards from the judges, which was slightly intimidating but a good way to really get to the heart of the project, it must be extremely hard for judges to understand the nuances of each scheme just from a standard award submission.

Thank you to all our wonderful collaborative team who were involved in this project, it could not have been done without us all working together. Also, this project could not have been achieved without our amazing and encouraging client, always so open to our ideas and really became an integral part of the design process, making for a richer and more successful scheme.

This award is so important to us, not the trophy but what it represents. As a practice we strongly believe that architecture hold the potential to be a vehicle for social and economic change for the better, we strongly advocate the idea of reusing and reimagining where possible as it can deliver more sustainable and far richer designs.

Congratulations to all those shortlisted in the awards and to Atkin Studio the overall winner for their Drovers’ Bough project, and to Unknown Works for Brightbox which took the People’s Choice Award. There is an exhibition running for the next month of all shortlisted projects at the APT studio at 235 St John Street, London. If you get a chance it is well worth visiting and is free to all.

AJ Small Projects Award Shortlist

The shortlist for the AJ Small Projects Award 2022 has been announced, we are so thrilled to have St Margaret’s Church included as one of the 20 projects on the list from the 170 entries they received.

These awards were launched in 1996 by the Architects Journal to celebrate and showcase schemes that have been completed on a smaller budget, in this year’s award all the projects included have been realised on a budget up to £299,000.

Having this modest budget for the church reinvention was obviously tight, however we believe that it has given a richness to the scheme, we have had to work very hard to achieve the goals for the completed with the modest cost.

All those shortlisted have been invited to present their projects to the panel of judges on the 6th April, when the overall winner will be selected. The full list of projects can be found here and the project can also be found on the AJ Building Library here.