The Head of the Land Observatory, the cockpit. Decades after the building goes out of use, the power of the sea takes it’s toll and the building comes apart, leaving the head beached and ravaged, a fragment of the instrument… failed like the experimental island on which it is sited. 

I took the model to uni yesterday, i made it through the olympic traffic, my precious cargo stowed with care on the passenger seat. I took time to add the finishing pieces, and construct a simple plinth block. I used the university studio to photograph the piece, and then carefully bubble wrapped it… today it will be shipped to the Venice Bienalle 2012. 

My university has asked me to build a model in white card of my final project to be sent to the Venice Bienalle…its coming along…i am making a big effort with it to keep it clean and glue free, i wouldnt normally model in white card its their choice, but… its coming along.

I’m already saddened by the fact that it will not be returned to me….

Incredibly my final year project has been nominated for the RIBA Presidents Bronze Medal, I am now frantically reworking my sheets into the new format for submission. I had completely forgotten about my project, and now revisiting it, The Outer Trial Bank has the feeling of a relic, an abandoned scientific instrument, failed and isolated and left in this crater in the sea.

I fixed my work to the stand for the end of year exhibition, I was given quite a bit of space, which I filled with heavy paper and ink. This marked the end for me with the project, putting it on display is my disengagement with it, although I feel that I never quite finished with the Outer Trial Bank, and this Land Observatory needs more of my time.

thats it….

the final hand in of my Architecture degree. The final project was about isolation and an island research outpost called the Land Observatory, it only seemed fitting to construct a “crate” to present my work in, as if it were a delivery to the island itself.

I am totally engaged with this project now, and I dont really know how to stop working with it….

some sheets from my final crit, my building on the face of it is about observation and acts as an outpost  like Scotts Cabin, but underneath that it is a dark place of isolation, where everyday activities are intensified into events.

wheels, steel, and movement…its not a building any longer, it feels like a slow vehicle. Is this architecture, am I an Architect ?.

The final project of my degree has grown. It lumbers in a circle around the island on which it is held, giving shelter to researchers and scientists and observers of coastal erosion, the building is a land observatory, it is like Scotts Cabin, a shelter in a difficult environment, sitting in the island in the seascape, it moves with the coming and going tide on which it maneuvers casting its telescopes on the changing mainland.