Project Gallery
My final year project responded to Bristol city's disjointed topography at the St Mary Le Port site with a proposal that was organised, secure and genuinely of its context. My response was an Up-Skilling Centre, built to help local businesses learn to work with AI and modern technology rather than be left behind by it.
The building's identity comes from refusing to be a barrier. Rather than sitting as another block on the site, it curves around the remains of the church, wrapping a generous oval piazza into what had been dead ground, and opens on all sides so that people moving between St Nicholas Market, Castle Park and the retail core pass through the site rather than around it. The building stays low and is sunk 2.4 metres into the ground, so the St Mary Le Port tower keeps its place as the landmark on the skyline, visible from Bristol Bridge and the floating harbour.
Structurally, that curved form is carried by a double radial grid, set at seven-degree intervals to the east and five to the west, meeting at a central orthogonal reception that reconciles the geometry. A repurposed steel frame with CLT floor slabs replaced a concrete alternative once the lifecycle assessment showed the embodied carbon difference was too significant to ignore.
Sustainability was passive - first throughout. A 13.5m building depth drives cross - ventilation on its own; green facades filter particulates and cool the air, with CO2 sensors triggering automated venting only where occupancy demands it. Paired with efficient cork insulation, a thermal pile system, CLT floors adding a four-to-five-hour thermal lag and a concrete basement slab acting as a heat sink, energy use was cut by 64%. Given the floating harbour's rising water, all critical services sit 1.2 metres above floor level, and the landscape absorbs storm-water through sponge walkways and French drains. Even the rubble from the demolished Norwich Union building found new purpose, crushed into foundations and gabion walls.
Materially, the building tells a heavy-to-light story: dark cork and timber at lower ground give way to lighter CLT and glass as the building rises, echoed by columns that visually thin with height. Horizontally, it mediates between the hard masonry townscape to the north and the soft, organic texture of the park to the south, held together by a rain screen of reclaimed Bristol Pennant sandstone and a signature tensioned steel mesh, the "Bristol Flower," which cuts solar gain by 30% while giving the facade its own quiet pattern. Every component is fixed mechanically rather than bonded, and tagged with a digital material passport, so the entire building can be taken apart and recovered at the end of a 100-year life.
Design, philosophy and engineering, all at once, all mine to hold together: some weeks that felt less like a brief and more like an impossible mountain. The building evolved. It devolved. It mutated, week on week, until the answer became obvious: less is more, the site wanted to act as a living, fluid thing, and the building's real job was to filter it, not fight it. If I revisited it now, I'd be bolder, cutting a floor and letting the building hug the earth for longer. Stressful, yes. But it's the project I'm proudest of.
