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Textile Mill

Part 2 Project 2007
Liam Madden
University of Strathclyde | UK
The new Textile Mill proposed for the Condorrat Area of Cumbernauld is conceived as a new building typology that confronts directly the challenge of how we deal with industrial work places and processes, energy production, consumption and waste and how we deal with the thresholds between suburbia and a productive working hinterland. The new Mill addresses these issues by rediscovering the social connections between where people live and the landscape that they historically have worked. In its form the mill plays with the idea of memory and silhouette, by adopting a formal approach which is clearly linked to its agricultural heritage forming a new social object in the landscape.


Liam Madden's design for a twenty first century Textile Factory represents a fresh approach to how architects might engage with issues of employment. Reinvigorating an industrial sector that historically has had a long connection with the area around Cumbernauld, it is thoroughly researched in terms of contemporary textile production and renewable energy sources. Simultaneously Liam experiments with how metaphors taken from textile production might be 'woven' into the fabric and form of the building. Not only then does the project make an important contribution to the debate on work buildings, rural architecture and energy production, but it also contributes to the critique of current polices towards economic and social development in Scotland.

2007
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