CIVIC TRUST AWARD WINNER
MARCH 2022
The Civic Trust Awards scheme was established in 1959 to recognise outstanding architecture, planning and design in the built environment.
The longest-standing built environment awards in Europe, their aim is to encourage the best in architecture and environmental design and to recognise projects that offer a positive cultural, social, economic or environmental benefit to their local communities.
The New Library was announced as the Eastern Winner from 160 entries from across the UK and Internationally. The judging panel commented: “The execution of the new library and its relationship with Magdalene College is delightful and appropriate and will be enjoyed by the college for many years to come.”
Fellow and Chairman of Cloverleaf, Professor Tom Spencer (1973) said: “We are so delighted with this Civic Trust Award which confirms what we already know - a brilliant building that works so well for us in so many ways."
BIENNALE ARCHITECTTURA 2018
JUNE 2018
The 2018 Venice Biennale opened to the public on the 26th May. This year’s theme “focuses on architecture’s ability to provide free and additional spatial gifts to those who use it and on its ability to address the unspoken wishes of strangers”.
Our contribution is a collection of six large-scale models, each representing a hall for gathering that the practice has designed. These models are placed upon a rotating table which is a calendar and a cosmic machine. Each hall has a different purpose yet they all bring people together in a rhythmic and cyclical fashion daily, weekly and annually. The specific uses of each building are regulated by a calendar of events, rituals and times of congregation. Their calendars are inscribed on the outer rim of a turning table. The table can be rotated by hand. When you turn it, varying light falls upon the models representing the passage of the sun through the day from dawn to dusk. It is a manual and mechanical process.
The intention of presenting these models in this way is to emphasise the relationship between the enduring frames of the buildings and the endless procession of fugitive elements that pass through them periodically.