Project Gallery
Swindon Re-Gen was a third-year project responding to a genuine problem: Commercial Road's high street had been failing long before Covid and hadn't recovered since. Shops closed or ran endless sales that drew nobody in, while cars ran the 40mph limit through a street too wide for its own good. The brief, "Salubritas – Living Well," asked a team of eight of us to regenerate that "degenerative high street" into a climate-resilient, Net Zero neighbourhood, each taking on one plot and one building type. My Plot was a library for people with disabilities.
Collectively, we slowed the road down rather than widen the pavement. Speed tables and a chicane forced cars to a crawl; at every crossing, the road rose 15cm to meet a single continuous pavement level before dropping back like a speed bump, giving pedestrians visibility and priority. The slalom also created opened pockets for planting and benches, somewhere to walk, talk and sit beneath trees offering summer shade, rain shelter, and a cooling effect that helped keep the buildings from overheating. Cars were pushed to solar-panelled parking behind the high street rather than on it.
My library was organised around three groups, each given its own floor. The ground floor, the darkest by nature, served blind visitors: strong, deliberate lighting compensated for the low light, a Braille library sat at its centre, and keeping blind visitors at ground level avoided any need to navigate stairs or a lift.
The first floor served autistic visitors, informed by research into autism-friendly design: no hard edges, generous space for retreat, sensory and rage rooms on hand, and a location one floor above the constant footfall below.
The top floor, for deaf visitors, was built around sight - lines, since BSL and ASL both depend on a clear view of face and hands; circular tables let a whole group hold a conversation in full view of one another, opening onto a balcony and library garden where autistic visitors could also practise moving between calm, known spaces and new ones, tending plants at their own pace. Each floor carried its own visual register: hard lines and clarity at ground level, softness above, openness and light at the top.
Outside, the building leans into Swindon's railway heritage: steel detailing nods to the tracks, and the brickwork mixes reclaimed material from the site with brick sourced from local warehouses. That facade admits light while marking out each floor's identity from the street, and a colonnaded promenade shelters visitors so a bus or coach can drop off children or adults safely, out of the weather. At the centre, a skylight drops daylight through all three floors, tying the building's separate worlds into one.
Upon reflection, the timeline was rushed, and it shows in the places I'd still like to return to: cornices, ceiling design, acoustic treatment. Given another month, I'd have pulled the central light column slightly off-centre and rotated it, so the grid resolves into one calculated moment of awe rather than sitting dead in the middle.
