Alun Dolton MA Dip Arch ARB - Academic Works 1993 - 2003

Architect Urban Designer Masterplanner

The Urban Landscape

The built environment being part of landscape and landscape being part of well everything...Katherine moore telling a story of visiting a site with a developer, and him saying that there is nothing there, and Katherine’s response was, why? Did the world suddenly de-materialise at that point?The project is about forming a spine that linked the two railway stations, a continuous object that passed though, over and under existing structures that make up the site, linking all the

where people would want to be.

20 Degrees of Difference

Taking a 20 degree segment of city emanating from the centre of the Rotunda and exploring the urban environment withing that sector, taking in the dead spaces as a result of the Inner Ring Road, under the Rotunda, along High Street and therough to Masshouse Circus. The project became centred on advertising billboards, shopping culture and energy usage in the city, trying to visualise making a car city car free, suggesting that the environment of the city could be used to generate power through

buildings.

Cleansing the Industrial Void

The site for this project was Digbeth, on a vacant site next to the Custard Factory, abandoned except for few cars. The project was about a support structure to hold the decaying elements of city together, forming an urban oasis a, tranquil zone where people could rejuvenate themselves, through using the facilities, creating a focus within the industrial wreckage that would breath life into the industrial void. The building itself a steel tube structure, with water running through them, connected to solar panels on the roof, to heat all the, spaces and facilities.

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BA 109S First Year Exploratory ProjectShared unit with BA Landscape: 1994

BA 107/108 Design from ExperienceFirst Year Design Project: 1994

BA 110/111/112 First Year Major Comprehensive Design Project: 1994

I arrived at Birmingham School of Architecture in September 1993 under a bit of a

Technician, having worked in an Architectural Practice since leaving school in 1987, completing ONC and then HNC in Building Studies on the part time course at South Devon College of Arts and Techology. I was accustomed to scoring 85% in assignments, thinking I was invincible, this should be easy. I remember showing examples of my work that I had done in practice to my fellow students, they were impressed, but I was told by our tutor ‘great drawings, but that is building, not Architecture’. He also told us at the very beginning of the course that Architecture is about people, not buildings...it did come as bit of a shock to me at the time.

a broad foundation to the study of architecture and landscape architecture in the context of the urban condition. With many projects being based on aspects of the 1960’s modern urban core that makes up Birmingham city centre, the industrial voids in the city and surrounding areas. Throughout the course, units were aimed at reading and interpreting the non-designed and designed environment, supported by an introduction to a wide range of representational media. All studio units were centred around presentation and discussion of ideas in a crit environment.

These are all projects that have been pinned up, presented, shot down, and learned from. The selected projects included show areas of

BA Hons Architecture 1993-1996

Introduction

Layers of Change

The study area for the project is Digbeth, centred on the Custard Factory, that is. The site is adjacent to the crossing of the River Rea,which as a bit of research revealed the origin of the foundation of Birmingham.

The Exploratory Project is an investigation of the layers that make up the urban fabric and the effects of the burning out of the industrial city on the urban environment proposes a series of interventions that emphasise the layering and explores the process that the city has been through.

The Dynamics of Rowing

End of year project: Riverside Pavilion. Opposite Royal Shakespeare Theatre, upstream from Stratford boat club. On the site of existing bowls club on bank of river Avon. New rowing and Bowls clubhouse for Stratford upon Avon Boat Club and Bowls club respectively. Accommodation of programs associated with rowing events, bowls, training, specialised storage, clubhouse/sports pavilion. Expression of movement and energies connected with rowing. Investigation of boat building techniques and technology transfer to architecture.

Welcome to Walsall

Investigation of activities associated with travel, arrival, departure, comfort, aimed at encouraging people to use public transport.Proposal: Pavilions in the park, development of park as ‘welcome mat’ for town, treatment of individual activities associated with bus travel, waiting, meeting, along with those associated with spare time, dining, browsing, milling about whilst waiting, etc. Superimposition of unifying structure. New program comprising, coffee shop, gallery, communications centre,

facilities.

Fourth Dimension

Exploratory Project: ‘4’: Representation the of dynamic nature of the city, through studying the medium of photography, assemblage, drawings and models. Capturing the 4th dimension.

BA 212 Second YearDesign Studio Themed Project: 1995

BA 209/210/211 Second YearDesign of Small Public Building Comprehensive Design Project: 1995

BA 303/304 Third YearSpace and Occasion Design Project: 1995

BA 308 Third Year Design Studio Themed Project: 1996

Transitional Space and the City.

The site is a Satellite campus to the East Birmingham College, the courses offered are diverse and comprehend the needs of the immediate surrounding community. The area is a planted ‘model village’ developed in the second half of the eighteenth century following the success of Bourneville. This village however appears to have proved unsuccessful, with community life apparently suffering as a result. There is a pressing need to inject the life back into the community, a need which can be addressed by this project which could form a new centre of the community, to build a nucleus around which new life can revolve. A new educational and cultural centre will give life to the community.

Transitional Space and Education From an early age we are in a state of transition, we are continually learning, we work towards an educational goal, when we reach that goal, it becomes the foundation for our next stage of education in which new goals are set. Education is a journey on which we gain knowledge along the way, we achieve a heightened awareness as we process more information.

Environmental Approach

The street frontage of the site faces south, and the solar orientation is used to control the environment within the building. The glazed south facade acts as a heat collector, backed up by a masonry wall

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BA 309/310/311/312 Third Year Major Comprehensive Design Project: 1996

BA Hons Architecture 1993-1996

that acts as a heat store, in a passive solar design similar to a Trombe wall. Excess heat is directed to a tower that acts as a solar stack to exhaust stale air. The ventilation system works by drawing cooler

glazed facade and associated masonry wall creates a trasition space that acts as a shop window to address the street scene, an exhibition space, a circulation spine and informal meeting space.

The tower is inhabited by an observation pod at the top. The concept of the observation pod grew out of the sense that the site is out on a limb from the city which is exaggerated by the lack of visibility of the city skyline. A section taken through the land form

level it would be possible to see the city skyline

and the features of the surrounding area. The observation pod acts as a receiver which collects and feeds energy into the site and the education process. At present information technology is being used to create cultural entities such as virtual reality, cyberspace and the World Wide Web, taking the working title of the Web Centre, the site could be seen as the centre of the World Wide Web, as any Web Site can be.

The observation pod affords the use of information technology to teach the user about the actual reality of the built environment in which they live. This is achieved by backing up information gained by the user through what is viewed via the telescope, with information about the site that they have focused on.

skyline they use the same point and click method that is used by many computer programmes, where to obtain more information the user simply presses a button when the cursor is on the window that they wish to view.

Solar collectors harness the sun’s energy and feed it into the building, to heat the water and assist in heating the spaces. Electrical energy is generated by the wind turbine and fed into a capacitor in the basement of the building and stored for consumption by the electrical appliances within the whole building

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UK-ISES Headquarters, Doncaster

The aim of this project is to produce a landmark in sustainable building, in essence to develop a stage to demonstrate the potential in sustainable architecture and the technologies involved. The project has developed following three main strategies: 1. Sustainability of the materials used in the

construction process.2. Solar Energy how it can be harnessed,

stored and used withing the building and its environment.

3. How the building makes the best use of the energy available.

The Origin of Spaces

Shrewsbury is a town situated on the border of England and Wales with a long history dating back to the Roman occupation in founding of the town of Ucronium. The town has marks of the Norman conquest, manifested in the castle, and has many buildings surviving from the medieval period, it has a grand railway station and exhibits the wealth of the Victorian era in classical buildings following the Renaissance in Italy. It is also the birthplace of Charles Darwin who is memorialised in a statue outside the library, and whose name is given to a sad mock ‘Tudorbethan’ shopping centre.

Two Way Street

Shrewsbury and the theory of evolution. A long section is cut through the town and manifested in a model, that links the English bridge and the Welsh bridge, a vista of experience, exhibiting the town as a dynamic object. Sites are selected for interventions that demonstrate the transient nature of cities, where life has moved on leaving the buildings out of context. One such site is St Julians Craft Centre, situated in a former church with a Gothic Tower and a Classical nave here interventions into the fabric demonstrates the urban evolution that has occurred by reprogramming the spaces.

Theatre of Memory

An intervention into the Bull Ring Centre, that is developed through a series of studies of life within the area of city that is characterised by the 1960s ring road and shopping centre. From Calvino there is no city without the lives of the

abstraction from individual frames a series of drawings are made, superimposed creating a composite map of the activities of the people in the space. Through a process of deconstruction a construct is made that could be reinserted into the city as an events venue that becomes part of the very life of the city.

Post Graduate Diploma Architecture 1997-1999

Dip 404/405 Fourth YearInterest Assignment and Design Project: British Steel Architectural Student Award Competition: 1997

Dip 501 Fifth YearBuilding Design Project: 1997

Dip 501 Fifth Year Building Design Project & Dip 514 Production Information: 1997

Dip 516/517 Fifth YearSpecialist Design Project: 1998

The Med Deck

Developes from a strategy to tackle fear of hospitals from a child’s point of view. Space capsules are suspended above the ground overlooking a lake, linked back to a service spine that accommodates consulting rooms,

structure that supports the capsules sits on the ground extremely lightly to allow the natural habitat to grow around the structure. Towers act as solar energy receivers, the lake is used for

in the control of separate environments.

The Beaubourg Experiment

The Paris of 1998 is a far different place to the Paris of 1968, as it will be different to the Paris of 2028. The physical context changes very little, but the cultural context will render the Paris of 1968 almost unrecognisable to the

the Urban Grain in 1977, it was not intended

but will be accepted as part of it in the future. In 1977 Centre Pompidou did address the cultural context of the time.

Reconstructing Memory

From ‘Full on and Flat out in New York’:-Battery Park City to the south, or is it Southend-on-Sea, Brighton or Bournemouth with its pier and sea front pavilions. Walking between the wedding cakes of wall street, the spaces narrow

the world? On the return, travelling beneath the Hudson river and into New Jersey. Manhattan

Empire State Building and the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre fade in the mist as they fade into memory.

The City’s Memory

How could the city’s archive be made in such a way that this process is open and visible that could make it unique to Birmingham? The archive needs to address the public realm, it needs to be able to present revolutionary discoveries so they can be of interest to a seven-year-old who is used to learning through watching television or playing computer games. How will the future’s children respect history?

Is the library a stuffy institution with dusty old books and dusty old librarians?

Dip 512 Fifth Year. Advanced Communications/CAAD. British Steel Architectural Student Award Competition 1998

Dip 507/508 Fifth Year Dissertation: 1998

Dip 506 Fifth YearExploratory Graphics: 1998

Dip 509 Fifth Year Design Approaches, Advanced Architectural Design: 1998

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Archive 4 Birmingham

The philosophical approach to the project is aimed at reinforcing the citizen’s Identity and by doing so taking archives into the next millennium. It represents an exploration of role of the ‘library’ in the future and by extension the role of the book as a bearer of information.

The starting point is the requirement to house the archive of the city library, essentially the city’s memory, this is not just about placing documents in a box, this is a highly serviced environment, different books, documents, documents and artefacts are stored in

conditions to protect them from further decay so that they are preserved for future generations.Different objects require different support infrastructures, for example a book is easily readable and movable, the only restriction being the controls placed upon it by the institution. Photographs need to be stored in specialised conditions; there is a requirement for some photographs to be stored at temperatures of

exposed to light.

In considering these observations, a major challenge is that the city’s memory is public property, that is every inhabitant regardless of age sex or ethnic origin has the right to access. To discover events of the past that shaped their city. The issue of affording public access to objects that are safely locked away from light

access to three hundred year old documents? For example the city library has an internet site, the catalogue to the archive is accessible from anywhere in the world. at the time of exploring the brief anyone in the world (provided they have internet access) could view pages from James Watt’s notebook explaining the discovery that

the latent heat of steam could be harnessed, a discovery that contributed to the start of the industrial revolution – BCL website 1998.

This is a key discovery in Birmingham’s development, James Watt was a member of the Lunar Society, a group of key thinkers of the time who met once a month to exchange ideas to gain momentum of industrial progress. By extension this discovery led to increased travel, trade, production, colonisation and the establishment of the British Empire, the world view changed, colonisation led to immigration and the start of what we now term a multi-cultural society. This demonstrates that there is

Post Graduate Diploma Architecture 1996-1999

Dip 510/511 Sixth yearAdvanced Architectural Design: 1998

a cause and effect relationship between place and events and what gets recorded and later regarded as history.

by establishing its purpose in relation to the

archive as a containerof information as a point of departure, the project investigates what is

not a neutral entity; and taking information as a subjective representation of the events that shape the city. In this context the design sets out to express the processes involved in the making of an archive, from the generation and

recording of information, to the selection and storage of the information that is to make up the archive.

The project manifests itself through four elements; the stack, the active wall, the interface with the archive and the interface with the city. There are four stacks making up a huge computerised racking system, a kinetic sculpture, in essence a giant data warehouse; archive items are stored in stainless steel time capsules which are then retrieved at will by the public, the four stacks differentiate between specialist archive materials: paper,

each requiring specialist conditions to facilitate the event of retrieval.

The interface with the archive is made through the provision of specialist reading areas, whilst the interface with the city involves cafes that act as an energy harness where people can come to eat, drink, talk, look and access the catalogue to the archive through the internet.

The active wall is the unifying element forming a backdrop to the events being supported by the archive facilities. Live images from around the city are projected onto the wall along with images if activities within the wall, such

as conservation and sorting of elements. In conclusion the project takes the archive out of its container where people can come to discover or rediscover the city.

Crit WallMA Architecture Design and Theory 1999-2003

Having completed the Post Graduate Diploma in Architecture, there was a sense that there

into architectural education from a technical background with 5 years experience of working in architectural practice, already knowing how buildings go together, relearning in the academic environment was far slower than previously experienced and the theoretical exmination as to why we build, and how we interact with the living environment of the city was stunted by the requirement to produce a building.

In previous years there was the opportunity to continue the Post Graduate Diploma for a

thesis project and submit the work to gain a Masters Degree. At the time the school was not offering the same facility. A small group of us elected to undertake a full Masters Degree part time as a separate course, amid many questioning us as to why do an MA when it is all about going into practice, and for many essentially experiencing the realities of the

RIBA Part 2 Graduate, with only one year of work experience gained during the year out.

Due to work commitments and the pressure to gain RIBA Part 3 as soon as possible, the 2 year course became 4 years for submission

work and been awarded the Masters Degree

answer is absolutely! The investigation into the social, political and cultural context in which we operate has opened up architecture from the making of buildings, to planning entire cities.

DT2 Analysis, Criticism and Methods: 2000

Schizophrenia of the New Street Complex

The metaphor of mental illness is uesd to describe the condition of the site that represents

and the user. The multiple programs of the City Centre, Palisades shopping centre, New Street Station, are forced into the same space. A mish mash of these converge on the ramp that runs from the Junction of New Street and Corporation Street, up to the entrance to the Palisades past a huge Mc Donald’s.

The drawings oncentrate on reresenting events and settings, investigating how humans are

behaving in these settings, the study moves from analysing the spaces and structure that is holding them together (or is it apart) and focuses on how people are being affected by the cmplex that they are moving through. .

A white line drawn down the centre of the

order to assist this, signs and electronic voices constantly remind pedestrians to keep left, half way up (or down, depending on your direction of travel) Mc Donald’s happens, what seems like hundreds of people spill out, to crash into the hoards of people moving up the ramp. Bad luck if you actually want to go down the ramp!

After recovering from the Mc Donald’s incident

shopfronts interrupt it. Into the Palisades, the deliberate criss crossing of peoples’ paths breeds more collisions.

The story continues, encountering more

reacting to situations as a result of being forced through the same series of spaces.

Introduction

DT5 Theoretical Approaches: 2001

Continuity and Extension

the railway, there are events that caused the railway to be part of the city. The site before the arrival of the railway is shown on maps as being part of a medieval town. The map is drawn giving preference to activities centred around the ‘Bull Ring’ and St. Martins church. The most prominence is given to the manor house, the ancient seat of power of the Lord Birmingham.

Through reading Lewis Mumford. - ‘The postulates of Utilitarianism’ from ‘The City in History’, and through studying ancient maps of

the city, it is apparent that the city is never a blank canvas, it is a continuation of the previous city.

The railway is ‘cut’ into the fabric of the city, in time it has caused those areas directly adjacent to decay and has produced dead areas. The investigation continues to explore the Zeitgeist from nineteenth century programs of commerce and industry creating the need for the railway to plunge into the life of the city, to twentieth century programs of trying to deal with the impacts, the Futurists in Italy, the Constructivist in the Soviet Union, the Modernists in France and Germany

Anthropological study

The second reading of the site starts through photography, then manipulating the images to concentrate on the way the space impacts on the users, ‘space violating bodies’ - (Tschumi), and explores the intended and unintended events that occur on a daily basis. Arriving and departing on trains, queuing for tickets, the air of anxiety, waiting, buying, selling, eating, begging, taxis dropping off, waiting, picking up, and the numbers of people trying to rush through the whole scene where all these events are occuring sumultaneously.

Formal Study

The third reading of the site in terms of the built form, investigating the different programmatic elements, and their relation to each other. Although not intended as a design project, sections were drawn to explore concepts, investigate how collision between different programs could be resolved and provide a vehicle for futher investigation. In recognising that the site is a living organism it is not a case of redesigning the complex, it is one of understanding how and why it has come into being, and understanding the social context that any intervention will need to address.