Characterising a community facilitator

My project focuses on characterizing Colston Parade as a solution towards providing a community facilitator that enables community uplift and interaction. This characterization is through a design aim of believing that the history of a building should not impact its viability to promote positive, sustainable and community empowering architecture today. The design focuses on reconnecting a medieval access route from St Mary Redcliffe Church to the River Avon, which prior to Colston Parade’s creation in 1770 was of a clear public threshold.

This action will involve breaking through Colston parade and providing an access route through an existing courtyard, providing community access, restoring Redcliffe to circa 1770. The proposal focuses on placing an intervention through 4 Georgian terraced houses. The project retains the existing outer shell of the building, removing all internal conditions, subsequently removing the layout and configuration of the residential dwellings. Through placing a key narrative in material preservation, the project re-incorporates existing materials and parts into a new elaborate internal structure which aims at housing this community intervention.

A Glue Laminated Timber grid will be inserted into the void space, providing an intricate series of mezzanine floors which reflect the creative intent explored through the research and identification of a surrounding area which is heavily immersed within the cultural and creative expression of wider Bristol. Thus, through exploring a contextually sensitive area associated with arts and crafts, an intervention through Colston Parade provided a historically connecting design-based functionality. Subsequently enabling a project which would revitalize community facilities through spinning the narrative on what a building’s contemporary value could achieve. The project encompasses a lightweight Glulam frame which houses all key spaces, with focus on facilitating trade, exchange, and interaction of skills with a permeable ground floor market and workshop space. With mobile market stalls, the organizational arrangement is considered so elements can expand into a space yet detract and fix to the internal walling. A central staircase and lift provide access to all adjoining mezzanine floors creating the basis for our community cabinet display.

This will provide an encasement, created through repurposed horizontal and vertical joist members which will combine to create a cabinet system which can flexibly fit together to provide a plethora of different sized shelving spaces. The shelving units will be encased through the re-use of existing glass panes, creating a personal attachment and configuration to a community orientated space. Sprouting off this core, a series of mixed media, library, cultural skills, and pottery rooms are centred on overlapping floors to create a design which breads a contemporary and modernistic approach to change, appropriating the need for artistic facilitation in Redcliffe.