TANTALLON, SCOTLAND

Academic | Inhabitat Research Centre

Tantallon Castle, Scotland | 2009

BRIEF

Eco-Sustainable Building (Passivhaus), designed as a creative hub & retreat for environmentalists, designers, architects, artists, and scientists. The building accommodates an architecture and design studio, office spaces, restaurant/bar, and a residency with underground sleeping quarters. This 'hub of creativity" would be specifically focused on the development of innovative products and sustainable concepts that could assist our blue planet to become a 'greener' place. It would feature workshops and conferences with professionals, students and academics from around the world. To reflect the value of sustainability, we conceptualised the building using vast amounts of timber products, sustained by a pragmatic reductionist approach. It is our hope that by 'reducing', the resident creators, will themselves be inspired to focus on what is fundamentally necessary for their own projects, and promote sensible use of natural resources. The ruins of Tantallon Castle, are found to be ideal to accommodate the concept of a reductionist aesthetic that aims to format the resident designers with their intrinsic relationship with nature. Firstly, due to the site's magnificent isolated location, and secondly, because the ruins themselves reflect a natural extreme in material reduction.

(Final year thesis at Edinburgh College of Art / University of Edinburgh)

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