< Back to News

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.

NIALL MCLAUGHLIN GIVES ROYAL GOLD MEDAL SPEECH FOR HERMAN HERTZBERGER

FEBRUARY 2012

Niall McLaughlin nominated Herman Hertzberger as the recipient of the 2012 Royal Gold Medal. At the award ceremony in London this month Niall delivered the formal citation for Herman Hertzberger on behalf of the honours committee.

“For Hertzberger inhabitation is the key….architects should be specialists in the daily life of people. This is done not by asking people what they want but by undertaking a rational observation of what they are.”

Link to the full recording of the speech