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New Doggerland

Part 1 Project 2024
Owen Neve
Kingston University Kingston | UK
A project to locate, on the north Norfolk fens, the intersection of dwelling and infrastructure, of agriculture and architecture, and then once located, to inhabit it.

Reed is a winter crop, cut and stored to dry just as the weather takes a turn for the bleak; it also happens to be a naturally good insulator. A simple symbiotic diagram began to design itself, wherein a dwelling is generated and insulated by the over-winter storage of the harvest. A core structure wears a temporary coat of warmth, then takes it off when the world turns again toward summer.

The scheme takes precedence from old farm vernaculars, in which ecology and architecture were irreducible in built form. It embodies a once-common sensibility that a building is not an object but a living system that synchronises itself with the rhythm of the seasons rather than battling it with mechanised conditioning.

This project also exists on the scale of the landscape; it contains regenerative land-management proposals and appeals to local government that attempt to counteract with design and policy, the centuries of attrition between man’s avarice and wetland that he wishes was dry.

But it can’t quite shake the creeping sense that the near-ish future closely resembles the ghost of Doggerland at its heels.


Tutor(s)

2024
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