Veridra

The Happold Foundation Project 2024-25 brief asked for a temporary House of Commons in Bristol: somewhere for Parliament to sit while the Palace of Westminster undergoes restoration, functioning until 2050 on a triangular Grade 1 listed site at the former Cattle Market.

We utilised temporariness rather than a constraint to hide. The building rejects monumental permanence in favour of a "slit and wedge" massing: three curved sails, echoing the lines of the adjoining railway tracks and the harbour itself, replace the single solid block a parliament building usually reaches for.

The chamber sits at the heart of that gesture. Raised a full storey above the rest of the building, it becomes the tallest element on the site and, deliberately, the most visible: a sculptural datum rather than a hidden inner sanctum. Beneath it, the columns that carry its weight create a permeable undercroft, a sheltered public realm where people can gather out of the rain and glimpse the workings of Parliament before they've even stepped inside.

Spatially, the building runs public to private across its length. The west, closest to the new eastern entrance at Temple Meads, holds the education space, visitor entrance and faith rooms; the east, more guarded, holds MP offices and committee rooms behind subtler entrances and tighter security. At the centre, we repositioned the NGO and education spaces, against the grain of the original brief, to sit at the building's heart: a mixing ground engineered for passive interaction between governance and the communities it's meant to serve. Outside, a protest space sits directly by the public entrance, deliberately separated from private routes, supported by groups like People & Planet so that demonstration remains part of how the building is used, not something kept at arm's length.

Sustainability followed a "lean, clean, green" logic: fabric-first, achieving a SCORS B rating for its first life and A for a repurposed second one. Roof-mounted PV generates 94,284kWh a year, stored in basement thermal batteries, while a coreless structural strategy alone saves roughly 100 tonnes of embodied carbon. Southwest winds drive mixed-mode ventilation, the central staircase works as a thermal chimney, and a basement labyrinth cools up to 325 occupants passively.

Structurally, the building is built to leave no trace: a fully demountable superstructure, joined by slip friction connections, bolted endplates and Lindapter clamps rather than welds, with 87.6% of beams modular and reusable, and hollow Hiperpile foundations that exchange heat with the ground through the seasons. The material palette reinforces the same ethic: reclaimed steel from decommissioned power stations such as Oldbury, hempcrete in the chamber and internal walls for its carbon-negative, acoustic and breathable qualities, Accoya timber shading the facade, CLT floors and Glulam roof joists, finished in slate and lime render.

At the top, a viewing gallery and café frame Temple Meads to one side and the harbour's changing skyline to the other, piping in live audio from the chamber below. The public gaze, quite literally, never lets Parliament forget who it answers to.

This was a genuinely massive undertaking, and one that only worked because it wasn't undertaken alone. Working alongside engineers and fellow designers turned out to be a real cross-pollination of ideas; between us, we built something none of us would have arrived at individually. The building's form came from combining my stepped-curve design with a proposal from a fellow BSc undergraduate, while the floating walkways began as an engineer's suggestion, taken and built into the concept.

Bringing that many voices into a single design is genuinely difficult; egos, instincts and half-finished ideas all have to find their place. And yet the building speaks for itself. Compromise, and the occasional bold, divisive call, is exactly what got us there.