The Miners Welfare Center

'which enables individuals to share their experiences across different groups and generations, forging new connections. When proposing changes to the Resolven Miners Welfare building, the main focus is on cultivating these relationships and creating a platform for these stories to be told.

The objective is to construct a dynamic space that can accommodate various functions while maintaining a consistent architectural language that facilitates storytelling. The CWTCH concept embodies the idea of providing a warm and welcoming environment, creating secure and introspective spaces for the people of Resolven. This includes re-engaging with various stakeholder and community groups in the area, creating a mutually beneficial outcome

A Cwtch, our catalyst, the community’s way to interconnect the generations through the sharing of stories, of skills, of time together and experiencing our community programmes together. A Cwtch should be a space that supports and nurtures and that is what we aim to create using soft architecture, light penetration and material understanding, this can emulate a nest like environment for the human scale, also creating a haptic response. This allows the space to become grounded and provide a sense of safety to the reader1. A place to sing of your past and reconstruct these memories within a space that responds to this purpose

One can re-define and give the sombre atmosphere created within the poem of the `Coal Miner`3 a new hopeful spin. This is done by responding with our architectural intent: to take the existing stories and to celebrate them. What better way to depict a space so full of a sensory journey4 which is born out of the mining industry which harboured no such life-nurturing atmosphere. To create a cavern of a home, which brings warmth and comfort which the mines never did to the community of Resolven. This depiction of one of the reading CWTCH spaces can be used as a methodology for the other intimate spaces within the future proposal which aims to become points to meet.

1 - Edmund V. Strolis (2017), Coal Miner
2 - Pallasmaa, J. (2019) The eyes of the skin: Architecture and the senses.
3 - Bachelard, G. et al. (2014) The poetics of space. New York: Penguin Books
4 - Jean Caubere, Deserts (Paris: Debresse)