Michael Syme

The brief for Unit 6 ‘Civic Structures: Time and the Tectonics of Public Space’ encourages the recognition of a new civic building as a system of layers of materials, each one with a different lifespan. It hopes that, in doing so, the architecture becomes something which works with the contemporary city and which is also ready to offer itself to a future city in both cases, defining public space.  This project takes this idea of layers and considers each layer of building design and the fabric through which it materialises at first individually and then together. Exploring what each layer offer during its particular lifespan and then how these layers might combine to produce a building which is contextual and expressive but which also meets the need to design structures which are robust and can be appropriated for a number of uses to ensure each of the aforementioned layers see the end of their lifespan and are not taken away prematurely.