architecture
Love, Life & Lobsters
Love, Life & Lobsters, set on the Orkney coast, is the design for a live/work, model eco-community, where the work element focuses on food production – specifically the catching of lobsters. The community traverses land and sea with a uniform language of driven piles and bulk mass and is built using repurposed natural waste materials. This includes using crushed oyster shell to make a hardy Oystercrete, detailed intricately to weather in unison with the harsh landscape in which it sits.
Located in the Bay of Skill, off the west coast of Mainland Orkney, the project site is exposed to a harsh climate. Strong winds and arctic rain drive into the Bay from the
North Atlantic.
The site surround is sparse and contains little to no development. The south of the Bay is home to Skara Brae, UNESCO World Heritage Site. This is a series of 5,000 year-old homes, each constructed in the same image - an ancient model community.
The settlement as a whole, traverses land and sea with a consistent language of conversation between driven piles and bulk mass. The production line is maintained in programme.
Through both form and programme the architecture is able to respond to the environmental conditions in which it sits. Tidal flooding is mitigated by using sacrificial ground floors and through programmatically assembling technology and warm spaces above the high tide level.
The primary construction material for the model community is oyster shell limecrete, not concrete – but a more-sustainable concrete equivalent made by substituting the gravel aggregate and cement of a traditional mix for oyster shell. For all of its environmental benefits, oystercrete is a relatively agricultural material. it doesn’t have the strength that industry-standard concrete can offer and that impacts on the architecture.
Externally the homes are detailed sparingly to tie the built form back to the battered and bruised landscape.
Shoreline homes use the oystercrete mass to form a unheated plinth cast into the ground, on top of which sits a light-weight Cross-Laminated Timber frame.
This construction allows the inside of the home to be be sealed quickly in bad weather. Importantly, there are no wet trades within the homes except for the oystercrete of the plinth and western façade, allowing for future disassembly.
Within the CLT floors, a transfer joint is used to provide what I term a ‘ying and yang’ floor. This allows the home to benefit from both thermal mass exposure and provision of service voids.
The formwork used to cast is reused to clad sheltered facades in a more gentle and recognisably, natural material.
Designed conceptually as a cliff-face, these shoreline homes provide shelter from the Bay of Skaill’s arctic winds and driving rain for a cosy and more gentle microclimate to manifest behind them.
Facades exposed to the south and west’s harsher weather are clad with a cast in-situ oystercrete. The remaining north and east façades will reuse the oystercrete formwork to as a timber rainscreen cladding.
Casting is typically a low-tech process that produces a mass and a void, the void usually created by a timber element. It is what happens in this void that brings the mass to life, whether it be a lobster pot, a planter or a bird nest.
Massing in this project uses this mass and void concept to celebrate low and high-tech materials as one product.
These voids of timber “moments” as I call them, happen throughout the scheme and are seen here, as the timber power tower pierces through the oystercrete switchhouse. The buildings along the pier sit in the water as concrete islands, sewn together with an ex-formwork deck.
Using that mass and void concept, the main concrete cube is pierced by two lighter-weight stilted wings. These wings each house laboratory-based aquaculture and agriculture. Aquaculture grows lobsters for wild release and maintaining a sustainable industry.
The working boathouse demonstrates how sacrificial lower levels are used to mitigate the everchanging tides to which the project is subjected.
Constructed above an unexcavated Neolithic site, these apartment-type homes treat the ground as the sea so not to unnecessarily disturb the ruins. This brings a cohesion to the project in using a similar language both offshore and onshore.
The communal dining spaces continue the language developed throughout the rest of the masterplan and provide space to share meals together. We are social creatures and human interaction and sustenance are basic needs.
In the ongoing emergency, sea levels are rising and will inevitably rise to a point where inhabitance of this site is no longer viable. As already stated, other than the oystercrete, there are no wet trades involved in the building of this masterplan. Therefore, when the time comes, the entire masterplan may be disassembled and either recycled or reused elsewhere, leaving behind a ruin of modernity to speak with its ancient counterpart across the Bay.
And life continues...