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.
JESUS COLLEGE PLANNING APPROVAL
APRIL 2015
We have won planning and listed building consent for the first phase of a significant development for Jesus College, Cambridge.
The West Court development includes the sensitive refurbishment and extension of a Grade II Listed building to provide research facilities, offices, social spaces and accommodation. A new café pavilion and basement bar extends the building’s north elevation and provides a prominent link to the rest of the College.
A 1970s building closes the courtyard to Jesus Lane and will be refaced, refurbished and converted to provide a lecture theatre with research facilities and two floors of academic accommodation. Linking the two existing buildings, a new entrance building houses conference facilities and serves the lecture theatre, research spaces and an exhibition room. It will provide access to future phases of the development including a new purpose-built auditorium, formal courtyard and nursery along with storage, archive and sports facilities.
The Master of Jesus College, Professor Ian White, said “We are excited by the opportunity the West Court development brings to take the facilities we can offer to students, alumni and the wider world to a new level of excellence.”