The Buzzard s Perch Cycle Station Part 2 Project 1999 Wiebke Rietz University of Plymouth | UK The Cycle Station project combined the challenge of restructuring an existing farm with the creation of new sympathetic buildings. The search for and the choice of site played an important part of the project, in addition to the exploration of the brief in all its aspects. The idea of forming a symbiosis of a cycle station and an organic farm was born out of the site and brief analysis. The farming aspects were further developed as part of the project.The station combines services for day visitors, such as a farm shop and a bicycle repair workshop, with accommodation and leisure facilities for complete cycling holidays. Accommodation ranges from a campsite to "bikotel" rooms with hostel type dormitories for the mid-range budget.The main emphasis was on converting the 19th centuary cob and brick barns, with the "Bikotel" rooms occupying the west facing former milking parlour and the dormitories occupying the east facing hay and cattle barns. The addition of a large glazed atrium over the farmyard, joins the barns together, provides an informal lobby area and a centre point to the scheme. A new building, the "m'eat'ing house", to the south east of the barns was designed to provide eating and meeting facilities such as a self catering kitchen, a canteen type restaurant, a conference room, etc..... Further new buildings and the re-structuring of the farm layout complement the scheme. Wiebke Rietz This student's work has been nominated for the President's Silver Medal for a series of reasons:- Wiebke explored a new building type, the Cycle Station, a choice of subject matter which clearly reinforced, on several levels, her concerns for a more sustainable architecture;- the initial research for the project took seriously the economic, social and environmental systems within which the client, a small farmer in rural Devon, would be operating, and made realistic and creative responses to these, in the framing of the brief;- the proposed solution made imaginative and appropriate use of existing redundant farm buildings, with considerable attention to the experience of the users, visitors and managers, and to the needs of the local setting;- the appreciation of the material qualities of both existing and new structures was exceptionally well presented through models of building details, presented in addition to the extensive modelled and drawn information.