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Hull Faculty of Art And Technology

Part 2 Project 2002
Leszek Marszalek
University of Lincoln Lincoln | UK
The site is placed next to the river, on the Wharf Island in Hull. I wanted create an urban pattern where greenery and architecture overlap each other.

The Faculty of Art and Technology is a platform for communication between students and society, students and town, town and society. The fields I placed in the Faculty derive from the possibility of effective cooperative work between them, but also from the needs of the City of Kingston- upon Hull redevelopment.

The school with its gallery is located at the crossroad of the main pedestrian ways and is surrounded by Art Park. It expresses the philosophy of the school to attract people to art and architecture and develop their aesthetic values.

I created a building without conventional plans. a design for a spatial microenvironment, where different fields in my school have its own identity, where every function is enclosed in a cubic form suspended spatially in the glass envelope. The way to the library or to the lecture theatre, is like a journey through a three dimensional urban structure.

The sense of community is also provided by small plazas, placed on different levels, by transparency of the structure where students working till late at night in studios can see the light in the other corner of their micro cosmos.

A large part of the building is covered by a glass structure micro envelope. On the ground plane a internal forest creates a magical feeling for students working in studios over the trees crowns but also giving all the environmental advantages.



Leszek has, over the two years which he has spent in the school, developed an architectural approach which draws heavily on a particular reading of place. Rather than projecting a utopian architecture of technical optimism he has been concerned with the state of things as they are and how in the end they might be made, paradoxically, more like themselves. The rough poetry of post industrial city has informed his thinking and infiltrated his projects. Matter, memory and the ordinary are valued and habitation is revealed less through light than by the absence of darkness.

2002
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