Interstitial Adventure
Design Studio// Year 3
The proposed design is a summer hotel at Birnbeck Island, an abandoned site located in Weston Super-Mare. The hotel is a site-specific proposal that, focusing on phenomenological experience, allows the existing buildings to be retained and the interstitial area between them to be linked and formed into an ‘interiorized’ covered outdoor space, that contains the modular hotel rooms and the ‘journey to rooms’.
The study of human responses is what has activated my architectural vision. The interplay between diverse materials highlights the exposure to the outdoors and the phenomenal instability of the circulation space between rooms, whilst the solid timber modular rooms evoke a sense of security and solidity. In order to achieve this atmosphere, the materials have been carefully chosen. Varied lengths of scaffolding, recycled scaffold boards and semi-translucent polycarbonate are used to form a semi-sheltered ‘interior’ outdoors as one moves between rooms. On the other hand, modular rooms in finely laminated timber offer a sense of comfort. These phenomenological characteristics build up two different atmospheres that will stimulate emotions of excitement along the way and relaxation upon reaching the solid modular timber rooms.
