A National Energy Museum for Wales within a wider Energy Masterplan

The vision for the existing Colliery Museum is to turn an underfunded museum with a plethora of heritage-rich artefacts, monuments, and existing buildings, into a new form of a museum, aiming to move away from the already over-saturated colliery-orientated museums in South Wales, into a new form of a museum, looking at the past, present and future. The museum sees three key Energy themes chosen to drive the design and user experience.

Industrial Energy has the opportunity to tell the unique story of the last surviving Colliery of the South Wales Anthracite Coalfield and the deepest in the World. Also allowing the unique industrial benefit of sub-terranean mine water with a heat network to be showcased. The focus of Mobility Energy stems from a wider scale of work looking at the deep-seated transport and movement issues in the South Wales Valleys, reinforced by my own experience. This theme allows communication of the transport revolution with the South Wales Metro and the Global Centre for Rail Excellence.

Finally, the Domestic theme allows the focus of the museum to be narrowed down to the visitors and shows the evolution of people's connection with Energy and looking towards how the future can be more energy efficient in the home. The whole experience of the museum aims to take the users on an Energy journey, moving from wide-scale Industrial Energy and the future of such being large investment developments that the users cannot directly change in their lifestyles. The move to Mobility Energy then takes the users to a smaller scale where they can start to make small lifestyle changes such as catching public transport and opting for active travel. Finally, Domestic Energy, being the smallest scale at the end of the journey, encourages instant things people can start to change and implement, such as having more energy-efficient light bulbs. The vision was to continue these themes into a wider masterplan for the site, taking advantage of the Metro schemes for Mobility, implementing the mine water in the form of an ambient loop network for the Industrial, and incorporating an Energy Village, Pentrefynni for the Domestic.

All relate to a mixture of lightweight and heavyweight architectural languages. These link to the two historical colliery periods of the site and integrate them back into the site. The heavyweight uses bricks with exaggerated structure, wide piers, and defined cores, while the lightweight uses a steel diagrid structure with transparent and opaque glazed facades and recessed cores.