Our role in the community
Community plays a key roles in our day to day lives. Whether that’s going to school, college, pilates, football or just going shopping at the weekend. We thrive off of being part of a community and when designing community buildings, it’s extremely important to keep the ideas and opinions of the local community at the forefront of our minds. We love being part of community projects around Exeter and want to show you what we’ve been up to.
Resident Architect at The Maynard School
Kirsty has been working closely with architect Nick Gilbert Scott at The Maynard Girls School in Exeter as Architect in Residence. The project involved a number of workshops with year 8 students, where the girls tackled issues such as site planning, scale and sustainability as well as having fun drawing and making models.
Tavistock Community Football Club
The principle aim of this project was to facilitate the development of essential football playing facilities and junior involvement for Tavistock and the surrounding areas of Devon.
We created 12 new pitches with new ground levelling and grading works to encourage good natural drainage on the flat new playing fields.
A community room was provided giving the overall importance of this complex for football senior/junior coaching; social events; committee meetings; fund raising events. Its prime use is for football development in the area – however more widely it is able to house community and business functions as a whole to provide an income stream for football development.
Newtown Community Centre in Exeter
We have worked with Newtown Community Association in Exeter to build a new exemplar sustainable building.
The project is designed to passively control it’s internal environment with high levels of insulation and air tightness. Photovoltaic roof tiles, an air source heat pump, locally sourced materials and rain water recycling all contribute to creating a truly sustainable project.
In order to involve the local community in the decision-making process, we ran workshops in association with the local school and residents. During these workshops members of the community could explain the requirements they wanted the building to have and design a layout that suited their needs.
