Celebrating the heritage of Resolven with performing arts

The proposal centres around the creation of flexible spaces with a focus on performing arts. We wanted the New Miner's Welfare to become the hub for socialising and prosperity in the Neath Valley.

Our research showed that Resolven is home to many groups of people who would want to use the building, so providing flexible and changing spaces was a way to accommodate a large number of groups.

The adaptability of the scheme plays a large role in the future sustainability of the project both financially and socially.

In Resolven there are a number of performance groups with nowhere proper to rehearse and perform. Although our proposal is very much a multifunctional project, we used the performance focus to connect with local stakeholders and sources of funding.

We used principles from the Fun Palace, an architectural theory from the 1960s by Cedric Price, where the users can affect change in the space to suit their needs at that time. This provides flexibility and ensures that the building is usable into the future, when the users and activities will change. Each group member focussed on a different element of the project and working together as a design team we discussed our intentions for the brief, and tried to integrate the sustainability, costs, heritage ideas and community focus throughout our project.

We took time to understand the Fun Palace and translate the ideas into design moves that are more appropriate to the scale of the Miner's Welfare and achieve similar goals.

We quickly recognised the financial issues facing the community and explored a phased construction process to reduce the money required at once.

The Fun Palace ideals are very applicable to the nature of the project brief, and the positive feedback that we recieved from the community reflected this.

Our estimated project cost was marginally over the budget we were given, but we identified a number of extra funding bodies with an interest in the goals of our scheme.