Last year architect Kirsten Stewart was invited by Ora Ceramics to visit the Florim headquarters and factory in Modena, Italy. It was an insightful trip, rewarding her with a detailed understanding of the product and manufacturing processes. Kirsten gave a presentation on what she learnt, allowing us all to better understand the journey from dust to tile.

Background

Modena, Italy, is an area renown for tile manufacturing with some 300 different companies based there - Florim is one of the largest ceramic tile factories in this area.

They offer tiles for a variety of uses, projects and markets. The largest tile they produce is the magnum wall and floor tile, which is available in an extremely large format with sizes up to 1600 x 3200mm - huge! During our visit the Florim team demonstrated how this tile size is handled, which is similar to large sheets of glazing, with four men required to lift the tiles in to place.

Interesting facts

Having seen bicycles parked all around the factory, we were amused to discover that because the factory is so large, the team ride them to get from one side of the factory to the other.

All the water used in the factory is recycled, cleaned, and reused on site. The majority of the factory processes are carried out by machines and robots, which transport materials around the factory; except the last process – the visual inspection – which can only be done by human eye in order to check for imperfections on each tile. Those carrying out this job are only able to do so for 30 minutes at a time, before they have to switch and take a break.

The impressive vertical warehouse used for storing tiles ahead of transportation, cost 14 million euros to build, and stores 35,000 palettes at any one time – which is however, only a relatively small part of the factory.

April 2017

Moray Council have granted planning permission to the ‘Garden of Playfulness’. The project is part of a £2.8 million investment in one of the National Trust for Scotland’s ‘priority properties’ – Brodie Castle.

The castle, near Forres in Morayshire, was the ancestral home of the Brodie family until Ninian, 25th Brodie of Brodie, negotiated the takeover of the estate by the National Trust for Scotland in 1980. Now it has been earmarked for a transformation to make it a key visitor attraction to support Scotland’s heritage.

Hoskins Architects have collaborated with erz, landscape architects, to create a landscaped space for exploration and adventure within Brodie’s walled garden, based on themes of family and play. To realise the National Trust for Scotland’s ambitions, the garden will be supported by a Visitor Pavilion, which will also act as the main entrance to the Garden of Playfulness. This will act as a gateway to the estate for visitors, and provide retail, catering and indoor play spaces. The design is intended for year-round use, and to support special events or exhibitions as necessary.

Site works are due to commence during spring.

March 2016

As part of our internal Continuing Personal Development (CPD) sessions, Architectural Assistant Joanna Lee gave an insightful 60-minute talk on UK power stations. Following her thoughtful comment on the architecture and the dramatic settings of some of the UK’s power stations, Joanna led us to reflect the use of the countless post-industrial buildings we in Glasgow are surrounded by.

The Buildings of Industry, by Joanna Lee

This topic was sparked by an ongoing debate on the preservation of building fabric – what do you keep? Are all building typologies equally important?

Coupled with an awareness that we are an architecture practice in Glasgow: a city characterised by its 19^th Century industrial boom, which now presents many opportunities for the reuse of industrial buildings.

This is no less encouraged by an interest in the pervading trend for an industrial aesthetic; and that I was brought up by a power station-enthusiast father.

Part 1 – UK Power Stations

Drax

A coal-powered monster in Yorkshire. While it was not chosen for its architectural merit, it is a personal choice, the power station my Dad worked at for years and a catalyst for this CPD.(IMAGE 1)

Battersea

A brick cathedral to power production in London. A swansong before it is redeveloped. (IMAGE 2)

Trawsfynydd nuclear power station

Designed by Basil Spence with the moody breath-taking landscape of north Wales as a backdrop. This decommissioned nuclear power station has an impressively foreboding presence, and is surrounded by listed landscaping. (IMAGE 3)

Fawley

Perched on the coast by Southampton, this is a station with an extraordinary glazed boiler house and fantastical 1960s techno futuristic aesthetic. (IMAGE 4)

Loch Rannoch

Operational since 1930, this northern Scottish Hydroelectric power station shows the long life of the renewable station, compared to the other fossil fuel examples selected. This building is joyful in its readability. Large pipes shoot down the hill to the turbine building from which water flows into the loch below.

Part 2 - Industrial aesthetic

Lauriston, a district of Glasgow sitting across the River Clyde directlysouth the city centre, is an example post-industrial area of the city and proposed development. In this small area alone there are many large listed factory buildings left derelict, while new-build development inches towards them. Reusing these buildings is a challenge: they are vast, cold, decayed, and dictates that their redevelopment is economically viable, like Battersea Power Station in London? Should they be delisted and demolished? Or just left unprotected to be absorbed into the urban fabric?

In reality, what we keep and repair is a mixture of all of these things. A balance of cost, taste history, and nostalgia. However, in order to do this well you have to deduce what is of worth. While there are of course statutory guidelines, the positioning of hindsight seems to bear relevance when reflecting the industrial buildings of 20^thCentury.

By going through typologies of factory buildings in decade increments to test my own feelings of attachment to these industrial buildings, I felt protecting those of the late 1950s to early 1960s to be my comfortable limit. I asked my colleagues the same question: did they want to preserve the 1980s Hoover Factory in Camberslang (PICTURE 5) as typical of this time? Or the giant Morrisons depot of the 2000s? It seems that these feelings are trends, maybe in the future we will think that insulated panels have that bygone solid honest feel about them.

Has this nostalgic element been driving the popularity of the current industrial aesthetic? The desire of the office worker to be in an exposed-brick environment, and a longing to be closer to the making process. A good example is Google’s main UK office, which is set to be housed in the soon-to-be refurbished Battersea Power Station, symbolising its productive nature and stability.

 To take this point full circle, larger companies and manufactures have picked up on this interest in process, presenting factory workings to the public in transparent, showcase buildings. Like Copenhagen’s Amager-Bakke power plant (PICTURE 6, image credited to Bjarke Ingels Group), which is designed to demonstrate the consequence and pollution of power production to a wider population.

March 2017

Jan Stauf from our Berlin office travelled to Budapest last month to visit the workshop of Kemabo, the manufacturers who are fabricating all the fixed furniture for our World Museum Vienna project.

While reviewing the first samples for the new reception desk, café, and shop, Jan received a fascinating insight into the brass patination process for the cladding that will be used on these elements. We are looking forward to seeing the final product once it is complete.

February 2017

Maquettes: Jan 20 - Feb 20

Models are useful. No other device comes close as a means to communicate and scrutinise an idea about a space, a building, a part of a city, or the construction of a detail, than a physical model.

But models are useful for other, more powerful reasons too. The special value of making a model as part of the design process is that a model has two lives: one representational, but another as an artefact in its own right. Models are also simultaneously concrete and abstract. They are an attempt to scratch out a specific investigation into the consequences of certain geometries, proportions, and massing arrangements; but their gift is that the finished model – an abstract object exhibiting the accidents of its own making and the traces of the designer’s missteps and adjustments - might ‘talk back’. It might suggest new lines of enquiry, or offer answers to questions we didn’t even think we were asking.

In this way, models are objects built with a purpose, and then read with an open mind. The relationship between these activities is where their particular value lies.

In Jan 2017 we made a small exhibition about models and their usefulness. In the gallery space of the building we share with an exciting bunch of artists and creative industry practitioners (South Block, in Glasgow’s Merchant City) we exhibited a range of our working models, particularly those concerned with our ongoing work at Aberdeen Art Gallery, alongside a remarkable plasticine city …

We Built This City

As part of the Doors Open Days Festival 2016, Hoskins Architects invited visitors to take part in an experiment which we called ‘We Built This City!’ A grid of 190 empty squares was set up, and throughout the day visitors contributed their own plasticine designs for a city block to the grid. As the day went on, a very strange and heterogeneous city took shape – with much more accident, humour, coincidence, anomaly and eccentricity than any single author could possibly generate in a lifetime.

Plasticine is an unusual material for architectural models; but it is very fast to work with and also very biddable, and therefore imposes a minimum of resistance between an idea and its execution. Many of our makers were children, but something about plasticine and its connotations with childhood play, seems to have infected the efforts of the adults too. The contributions are therefore wild, instinctive, silly, and in the best sense deadly unserious. This city would not look as it does had the materials been cardboard, timber or resin, or had the makers been architects. In its extreme vitality, the completed work is a rich, joyous and exciting thing.

Aberdeen Art Gallery

This project, currently on site, tackles the redevelopment of Aberdeen Art Gallery: the wholesale reorganisation of the building’s interior, and the addition of a rooftop extension for temporary galleries and public terraces. The design process was lengthy, reflecting the complexities of radical reimagining of an existing listed building, and model making was central to the process. Four of these models – a representative selection across a range of scales and materials – are described and illustrated below.

Context Model 1:200

This model studies the massing, rhythms, scale and language of a small parcel of city: one building, a triangular piece of public realm, and its immediate edges. This is the context into which our proposal nestles and to which it seeks to respond.This is an interesting scale to work at: small enough to understand a bird’s-eye overview of the urban composition, and grasp the totality of the composition at once; but also large enough to test pedestrian eye level experiences from a range of locations by crouching down and peering into the spaces made by the model. To be able to shift between verifying the success of big organisational ideas, the aerial overview, and the fleeting pedestrian experience of approaching the project and moving around it, is invaluable.

Study Models 1:200

We made a series of models to test a suite of ideas about the rooftop element – both to assess their internal logic as convincing form, and to test the success of their contribution to the immediate context. These card models were set onto the previous context model before the final copper iteration you see there now was settled upon. How the new element and the existing roofscape relate to each other is, in many ways, the central concern of the project. Different strategies, each with their own implications for the arrangement of the internal programme, were tested quickly and thoroughly. Ideas about degrees of enclosure, about darting skyline presence, and about a form that feels like it adjusts itself to act as a good neighbour to the various domes it joins on the skyline, were proposed, tested, and refined through this process.

Sectional Model 1:50

A shift in scale, and a shift in model type. A 1:50 sectional model of the central sculpture court at Aberdeen Art Gallery was built at an early stage in the project, and allowed us to get understand the extremely complex spatial interactions between the existing fabric, the new rooftop element, and the new staircases connecting those parts. This model is carefully made, and looks like a model made to present a final idea, but that could not be further from the truth. It has been adjusted, reworked, broken, repaired, improvised with, and endlessly photographed, as we worked through our ideas and discarded iteration after iteration. This is a wonderful and provocative scale to work at: large enough for decisions about how elements come together to carry significance, and large enough to get your eye into the spaces made by the proposals, but also small enough to describe a full cross section of the building proposal in one object.

Façade Model 1:20

This 1:20 scale fragment of the facade is the largest scale model exhibited. It shows that it is not always the case that the scale is increased to add detail – here, the large scale model is still very abstract, and is used to assess the relationship between a human figure and the width, depth, and height of a set of ideas about a cladding module. The model convinced us of the validity of a scalloped language, and led us to seek technical solutions to achieve this. Importantly, we enjoyed the way the model was ambiguous as to the solidity of these scallops – inviting a reading both as solid, cast monolithic elements, and also suggesting lightweight, billowing, tensile structures. We have fought hard to imbue the finished proposals with something of this quality, and that aspiration has remained a touchstone for the team throughout the detailed design of the project.

January 2017

We are pleased to announce the unveiling of Rockvilla - the new headquarters for the National Theatre of Scotland on the banks of the Forth & Clyde Canal in Glasgow - which was officially opened Monday 23 January 2017 by Fiona Hyslop, Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and External Affairs.

The evening’s opening reception welcomed guests with a spectacular sight: projected onto the façade were moving images that lit up the canal, and included a construction time-lapse and scenes from various past productions by the Company. Along with speeches by Fiona Hyslop, Councillor George Redmond and Dame Seona Reid, guests were invited to look around the newly opened building and meet some of the brilliant folk who produce, promote and facilitate the National Theatre of Scotland’s productions.

In keeping with the Company’s declaration of being a ‘Theatre Without Walls’ – committed to performing to diverse geographic audiences and engaging with the community - this new facility will not host public performances, but rather will be a creative engine room for the Company. Rockvilla will facilitate their expansion nationally and internationally, and will continue to reinvigorate a part of Glasgow that is fast becoming its cultural quarter.

The redevelopment of a disused industrial warehouse provides the Company with approximately 3700sqm of space over two levels, and incorporates: three rehearsal rooms of varying scales, a learning and community suite, wardrobe department, production workshop and technical store; plus office space and social areas.

You can see more about the project on our website, and watch the featured construction time-lapse here.

January 2017