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THE WELCOME BUILDING

SEPTEMBER 2017

The Welcome Building

The Welcome Building in Bishop Auckland consists of a new viewing tower and central ticketing hall for the The Auckland Project. It acts as an access point and gateway to the wider site whilst also giving views over the town and landscape setting. The tower – a timber framed structure – is now well under way on site.

The building team has worked tirelessly and with the highest level of precision, to build the in-situ concrete lift shaft. Working from the ground up seemed to take an age.

Meanwhile, the enormous larch glulam beams have been carefully crafted and manually grey-oiled in the joiner’s workshop.

The frames are now being lifted into position on site and suddenly the building can be seen. Almost in an instant. As if the past four years had happened in the blink of an eye.

We are so excited and proud – even – to see this fantasy project becoming real at last. But with completion on the horizon, time seems to now move all too fast.

YALE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

JANUARY 2015

Yale School of Architecture

Niall gave a lecture at The School of Architecture at Yale University on the 22nd of January. It is part of his role as Sir Norman Foster Visiting Chair for 2015. The talk was titled Origins and Translations and it described the thinking behind projects including Bishop Edward King Chapel, Auckland Castle Museum and the Athlete’s Housing for the 2012 Olympics in London. The talk coincided with the publication of an extended interview with Nina Rappenport in the spring issue of the Yale architecture magazine Constructs.