Our project in MAKING was to design a visitors’ centre attached to a whisky distillery. Our site, Cloughbank Farm, found in Ringway by Manchester Airport, used to be a farm but has now fallen into disrepair. Apart from the Grade II listed building’s it hosts, the site is filled with piles of debris. My project is driven by the desire to regenerate this site into a place for the community to meet and reconnect with the natural environment that surrounds us. This design has been uncovered through the process of modelmaking, both physically and digitally, and has led me to draw conclusions about form, materiality and spatiality, in line with the ethos of the MAKING atelier.
Through initial experiments with basic materials such as paper or plaster, I found a natural progression towards curved shapes that could be informed by the programme in which they contained. The idea of the form being informed by the distillery became a key creative driver – in the dimensions of the building, but also how spaces could be segmented and separated according to the material movement within. In considering the programme in the context of the visitors, it became apparent that I did not want visitors to be physically allowed into the distillery spaces, which called for a need for transparency that was reinforced by experiments with fabric and perforations.
This project aims to weave the new with the historic, whilst reconnecting people with each other and their surroundings. These ‘bubble’ pavilions connect to the historic through the topography they sit on and physically connecting to listed buildings. They force visitors to interact with each other in their internal spaces and encourages them to visit the site in order to reach the distillery.
