New Energy Landscape of Southeast Wales
William Handyside, MArch (Year: 5)
The project centres around the reuse of decommissioned industry and lays out a strategy of transforming collieries and mine networks in South Wales into systems of renewable energy storage.
As we move into a period of post-climate-change awareness, the project also deals with how we view the architecture of this period of fossil fuel reliance.
While the design elements of the project are site specific as they are intrinsic to the spatial conditions found in Clydach Vale. The proposal when viewed from afar is a project on the transformation of the Valleys of South Wales, putting forth a change in the attitude of these forgotten and uncared for towns, one that is no longer anchored in the past but instead is addressing the future.
Clydach Vale Capriccio The proposal when viewed from afar is a project on the transformation of the Valleys of South Wales, putting forth a change in the attitude of these forgotten towns
The Welsh Valleys Articulating the role mining that had in the identity of both the community and landscape of South Wales, while also dealing with notions of transformation in the Valley Towns
Relics of Another Time This is Tower, one of the few remaining collieries in the Welsh Coal fields,it serves as a constant reminder to the community of past livelihoods and subsequent abandonment
Removal is the Precursor to Transformation Object, buildings and landscape can all be transformed through first a stage of removal. Through precise cuts and acts of removal old objects are made new
Welsh Geology The geology of the area is made up of strata coal layered against hard Carboniferous rock, these seams of coal which were worked were made hollow by the process of mining
Welsh Coal Field In the South, across the coal field, there are c.1400 disused coal mines, which could facilitate this storage of energy
Cambrian Mine Network The town of Clydach Vale, the mine in red is positioned above the town in the anticline of the valley
Surge Tank Here an abandoned residential building becomes integrated in the system as a surge tank
