AUCKLAND CASTLE, TOWER AND FAITH MUSEUM WINS AT THE RIBA NORTH EAST AWARDS
MAY 2024
The Auckland Castle, Tower and Faith Museum has won the North East Building of the Year and North East Conservation Award in collaboration with Purcell.
The project comprises a number of urban and historic interventions: the restoration of the 900-year-old Grade I listed Castle, once home to the Prince Bishops; the Auckland Tower at the key nodal point between the historic Market Place and the entrance to the Castle complex; and the new extension to Castle’s Scotland Wing to accommodate the Faith Museum, which opened in 2023. The project seeks to preserve the Castle’s heritage, promote Bishop Auckland as a visitor destination and initiate regeneration of the town.
BIENNALE ARCHITECTTURA 2018
JUNE 2018
The 2018 Venice Biennale opened to the public on the 26th May. This year’s theme “focuses on architecture’s ability to provide free and additional spatial gifts to those who use it and on its ability to address the unspoken wishes of strangers”.
Our contribution is a collection of six large-scale models, each representing a hall for gathering that the practice has designed. These models are placed upon a rotating table which is a calendar and a cosmic machine. Each hall has a different purpose yet they all bring people together in a rhythmic and cyclical fashion daily, weekly and annually. The specific uses of each building are regulated by a calendar of events, rituals and times of congregation. Their calendars are inscribed on the outer rim of a turning table. The table can be rotated by hand. When you turn it, varying light falls upon the models representing the passage of the sun through the day from dawn to dusk. It is a manual and mechanical process.
The intention of presenting these models in this way is to emphasise the relationship between the enduring frames of the buildings and the endless procession of fugitive elements that pass through them periodically.