Permeability

'With the vision of restoring the Resolven Miners Welfare, there was willingness to elevate the existing all while providing something that was excitingly new for the community to appreciate and call their own. Essentially, the aim is to reestablish the Resolven Miners Welfare as a building that exemplifies the generational heart of the local people, ensuring that it is able to better accommodate the needs of its intergenerational demographic. Geographically, it is situated in a site that has the potential to thrive from its proximity to local educational facilities such as school and nurseries as well as the local library that seems to be declining. “Where there’s children, people will come” is a philosophy the project takes to heart, placing the youth at the heart of the RMW, which in turn will bring in their friends

The concept behind the restoration of the Welfare derives from the current lack of external spaces for casual play, extracurricular activities, and the elderly in the area. The programmatic strategy centered around the switch of the current restaurant and community hall as well as other more surgical moves that either improved, expanded, or diversified the spaces for social interaction. The demolition of snooker room and its replacement with a timber pergola is the most important design move, opening up the ground floor perimeter to create a more welcoming environment for locals and visitors. The floor of the snooker room, instead of being removed, will be reused and serve as a patio sheltered by the pergola. The sequence of spaces, by leaning into the Art Deco geometry, is animated by the ‘layering of permeability’, through which the building reads in varying extents of continuity, revealing the relationship between:
1. the internal and the external,
2. the open, semi-open, and enclosed,
3. the public and ‘pocket

These translate into a diversity of tectonic languages that the scheme celebrates. Indeed it is the contrast between the soft material tectonic of the pergola’s connection to the South-West façade and the hard material tectonic between the community hall’s pocket spaces connection to the North-East.

Exploring the concept of play as an essential spatial system, the patio will follow the ideas of ‘loose parts play’, which offers children creative control to use open-ended materials as recreational instruments. In this case, the structural frame of the pergola is designed in such a way that it becomes a support system for orthogonal timber planks to be slotted into, creating flexible platforms for displaying, sitting, climbing, etc… The architecture itself becomes puzzle-like in nature, encouraging children and adults to exercise their playful agency.

All in all, the scheme aims to restore Resolven and place it back in its rightful place, at the heart of the town and at the service of its people. Through more surgical interventions, dead space is healed, an improved sense of exteriority is created, and a more open and dynamic atmosphere is established. And with this contemporary proposal for the historical architecture, Resolven can build its future.