Common Ground Part 2 Project 2020 Marco Fiorino University of Cambridge | UK The Welsh town of Monmouth sits at the border between a protected landscape and an array of smaller rural agricultural centres. This project investigates both of these realities, imagining spaces where they might meaningfully encounter one another. The scheme envisions a contemporary common, intended to foster heightened environmental awareness and inspire critical reflection upon the dualism of nature and culture that permeates this region and its history. By creating new woodland areas near the town, the project will also alter the landscape in line with a flood retention scheme, helping to mend the town’s broken relationship to its surrounding riverscape. Located at Monmouth’s edge, the chosen site distinctly embodies the town’s fractured relationship to its surrounding landscape. Once a medieval orchard, then a prosperous cattle market, today it is a car park. The proposed architectural intervention will develop through a set of nucleated farmstead-style settlements. In an analogy to nature’s own patterns of growth, the buildings’ elements are designed to “replicate” themselves, thereafter to be taken to secondary sites. Following the local vernacular tradition, the agrarian buildings will be used to support sustainable forestry and agricultural practices and store what the community produces, along with providing spaces for educational activities. Tutor(s) Ingrid Schröder