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BIENNALE ARCHITECTTURA 2018

JUNE 2018

Biennale Architecttura 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.

SULTAN NAZRIN SHAH CENTRE WINS RIBA AWARDS

MAY 2018

Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre Wins RIBA Awards

We are delighted that our project Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre has won one of this year’s RIBA Regional Awards and the RIBA South Building of the Year. The project for Worcester College was won through a competition in 2013 and provides a new auditorium, dance space, seminar rooms, an e-hub and ancillary facilities on a site overlooking the spectacular Worcester College sports field.

The judges commented “To not only preserve but enhance this context would require a building of assured calm and grace. It would need to use materials with a tactile gravitas and be imbued with a timelessness which would make it feel as if it had always been there and need never leave. The Sultan Nazrin Shah Centre does all this and more.”