OLIVER BURTON.
INCIDENTS OF AN ARCHITECTURE STUDENT.
 

Botanical Observatory.
Janurary 2015.

The botanical Observatory is a design in response to my final major project brief. A multidsicplinary studio that looks to the surrounding ecology  through the mariage of science and art in the pursuit of holistic creativity and sustainable education. Promoting both contemporary creative practice and ecologically motivated learning. 
 

The comprehensive design project brief outlines the need for a hybrid building encompassing both private and public functions. The dynamic response should consider and display how the proposal impacts both its immediate external environment and the wider context, measuring both qualitative and quantitative impacts giving precedence to schemes acting as catalysts for imposed systems, e.g. sustainable living.  The design stimulates dialogue focused on the aspirations to create a design that bring together a variety of users into a building or complex in conjunction with the urban context. 

 

The design should encompass;

- Public activities and requirements.

- Business and/or similar commercial activities.

- Living accommodation target use and requirements.

 

The concept of the Hybrid buildings presents itself as an opportunity, offering the chance to collaborate, amalgamate and combine both the physical object and its uses. Straying from typological tradition, the hybrid building facilitates the combination of unusual functions and this unexpected mixture of application creates numerous proposals utilising its multiple features to revitali­se and often re define the urban public domain.

Born not out of choice but necessity, Hybrid buildings address the chaos of the modern urban environment not through grandeism unlike the the contextually prevalent Dolphin centre, but through exercising its ability to self sustain, and to create a microcosm of vibrant public life.

 

The site provided for the proposed hybrid building sits prominently on Pooles Quayside. Its currently occupied as a car park following years as host to a once functional grain silo and ancillary building, Several previous attempts have been made to gain planning application for the site, however due to a numeration of reason, none more so than harmonious intervention with the surroundings, no structures have seen construction begin.

 

With regards to my own approach to the project it was decided that due to the sites location -nestled into the urban framework surrounded on all sides by ecological havens and nature reserves – that the building must make an active effort to reflect its contemporary situation. From a conceptual perspective the functional aspects associated with the archiving of seeds and botanic’s incorporate   the survival of genetic diversity, forming the basis for provision of Staple food groups, textiles, horticulture, agriculture, breeding, raw construction materials, energy production environmental management and the maintenance of biodiversity.

 

In a more poetic association, the study and archiving of these plants and seeds can map the symbiotic relationship between man and nature, the plant acting as a vehicle that carries culture illustrating the fragility of human life and the increasing pressures placed upon the natural world. Often the minute scale at which these plants and organisms exist, allows their life cycles and process to the viewed as microcosms of our own existence.

 

The relationship between man and plant is reflected in humans utmost dependence on their existence, not only for agriculture but the support of our ecosystem as a whole suggesting that whilst the plant it its immediacy is viewed as a fragile being, the structure and reach of its effects are wholesomely fundamental.