The Shards
St. Cuthbert's Garden Village in northern Cumbria confronts a challenge endemic to the emerging development: the absence of a shared identity. Its communities are delicate and vulnerable to the disorientation that disconnection breeds. What is needed is a monument as an infrastructure that is resilient and rooted in history for people to erect a new collective sense of belonging.
The Shards propose a natural history museum at the convergence of three communities within The Village Centre, functioning simultaneously as a spatial, conceptual, and infrastructural anchor for a regenerative future.
The converging facades read as tectonic forces made permanent. Angular shards of the earth meeting at the central point, uniting the communities. Rooted in Cumbria's volcanic heritage, the museum teaches the past identities while acting as the driving force for the emergence of the new identities to come.
Past monuments may have lost their original owners and users. But their presence and identity still stands strongly and firmly till this day. The shards aim to remain firmly in place beyond human existence, rooting the identities of the present deeper into the geology and memory of place.
