Forres — Charlotte Clarke

Forres student acoomodation

Design challenge: To create an interior and exterior architecture for a new type of accommodation for the students of the GSA campus in Forres, Northern Scotland.

The 30 permanent students needed accommodation that was communal, adaptable and sustainably built. They currently live in the town which in the winter is a dark and dangerous walk home, therefore they want to be housed on site. The student number would increase to 90 for the holidays, so the solution had to accommodate this without intruding on term time life.

Timeline

1 month (November 2019)

Group members

Team of 6 architects and 2 product design engineers

Role

being a multidisciplinary team, we split into exterior and interior architecture groups for the latter stages of the project. I decided to challenge myself and joined with 4 other architects on the exterior team, as building exteriors isn’t something that we did very often in my degree.

Software

3D scanning, finite element analysis, Fusion 360, Meshmixer, CES

Skills

Interdisciplinary working, rapid protoyping, CAD, DFM,

Inclusive:

Meet accessibility requirements
Create a sense of community

Design requirements

Modular:

Must be made out of many of the same parts
Pre-fabricated off site

Flexible:

Must accomodate 3 times the amount of students in holiday time
Must be able to be removed when lease is fininshed
Must be made out of sustainable material that doesn’t spoil the landscape or harm nature

Research

Site visit

We conducted a site visit to ascertain, the environment we would have to design for and where we should locate the buildings.

We concluded that the area was quite boggy and that we should include walkways in our design.

Interview

We interviewed one of the lecturers of the university to gain a deeper insight into the students that would be inhabiting the accommodation and the problems they currently face

Learnings:

Do a lot of collaborative work
Need a communal space to relax, cook and socialise
The town of Forres has poor infrastructure and bad weather so they have to cycle 15 minutes through the forest to get to the campus and have to leave by 6pm as there is no onsite accommodation for staff either, and two staff members must be there at all times
There aren’t may rental properties in Forres so they have to go to other neighbouring towns, making this cycle even longer
There are only two buses a day so they can’t leave campus at any time if they don’t cycle

Ideation

We first sketch a few ideas separately before coming together and proposing to the group. We collaborated by using trace on the walls to see the flow of all of our ideas and how they fit together.