Wildlife Retreat - Architectural Review
September 1998
Text Architectural Review
Images Nick Kane, Níall McLaughlin Architects
The winged shack provides a studio and hid for a wildlife photographer, and a family retreat. At the bottom of the garden it hovers over a pond in a fold of Northhamptonshire countryside, its winged form inspired by the client’s fragile insect images, and others drawn from the war-time history of the site.
Surrounding farmland had been used a US reconnaissance base during the Second World War. Flights of B-24 black carpetbagger bombers flew on clandestine missions, serving the resistance in Holland, Norway and France. After the war the site was developed as a nuclear missile base but was abandoned in the mid -‘60s. The land is littered with the debris of military hardware – a dismantled bomber is buried close to the pond – and Niall McLaughlin’s design of the shack is threaded by memory of Anselm Kiefer’s stark paintings of war-scorched landscape.
The idea of building a studio over the object of study – insect life on water – occurred to the client after McLaughlin showed her his own photograph of objects arranged at different depths in a boghole and she began to image ways in which water could modulate light, to alter the depth of field. There was a pond between the garden and the open farmland, but it was stagnant and lost in a tangle of briar. To bring it back to life and to attract dragonflies, the briars were cleared and the water filtered, oxygenated with plants and filled with fish.
Link to full article here.