The Welcome Building

THE WELCOME BUILDING

SEPTEMBER 2017

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.

UCL SUMMER SHOW

JUNE 2015

The Bartlett Summer Show 2015 opens from the 26^th June until the 11^th July at The Bartlett School of Architecture, 140 Hampstead Road, London NW1 2BX. The show is one of the world’s biggest architecture degree shows presenting work from over 500 students. Niall teaches Unit 17 with Yeoryia Manolopoulou and Michiko Sumi.

These images show students from Unit 17 – taught by Niall, Yeoryia and Michiko – preparing for the show and installing their collective model. Each student designed a building in Leicester based upon a theme that asked them to re-imagine a regional British city in the light of the Government’s new proposals for devolved powers. The model is interactively linked to an array of mobile phones mounted around the edge that show short films of the students describing their work in detail.