Rehabilitation

Our unit had a strong focus on rehabilitation, whether that be related to physical or mental health, whilst taking a low-tech approach, responding to the current climate crisis. 1 in 4 people experience mental health issues annually in the UK with a 13% rise in incidence in the last decade. I’ve therefore chosen to take a closer look at more accessible and approachable means to improve people's wellbeing with this project. The unit’s based in Weston-super-Mare, a coastal town with a rich history as a popular seaside resort.

It experienced a decline in visitors in the 60s due to increased accessibility and affordability of foreign holidays. The town now has a less positive reputation, being the second most dangerous town in Somerset and housing 11% of the UK’s drug rehabilitation centres, so would highly benefit from a public rehabilitation scheme. As my site is coastal and with Weston’s history of seabathing, I explored cold water swimming. Sea bathing was popularised in the 1700s in the UK, including in Weston, as a cure for disease. We now know sea water cannot cure diseases, but this connection to water and nature is seen to improve mental health.

I’ve looked to cold water swimming as a modern equivalent for sea bathing. Some of the benefits of cold water swimming include boosted dopamine, lowered blood pressure and antidepressant effects. I thought there’d be an opportunity in Weston to create a structure facilitating a programme linked to cold water swimming as a form of rehabilitation. For the low-tech aspect of the brief I looked to stone. The site my proposal is on would be quarried and levelled, generating significant amounts of stone as a by-product, which I propose to utilise as my primary building material. Stone is highly sustainable, being natural, recyclable, and durable. With the stone being quarried on-site, the main carbon impact of the material, transportation, would be significantly minimised. By using a limited palette of local, site-specific materials my building becomes low-tech. For most of the internal walls, my proposal uses the actual cliff as the interior face, but the non-cliff face walls are constructed using cyclopean concrete made from excavated stone. This technique is a hybrid of the historic method of using large blocks of mortarless stone, and modern concrete.

By using larger aggregates, cement usage is reduced, increasing sustainability, and strengthening connections with the surrounding nature by reusing site demolition waste. The construction process is simple: placing stone boulders in form-work and pouring cement mortar, using sea-water for the mortar to hyperlocalise the material and enhance strength due to mineral production, ideal for a coastal building. My proposal includes an open café/restraint/kitchen, multi-purpose community room, changing rooms, sauna and lido.