34 PROJECT REPORT: HEALTHCARE BUILD & DESIGN
unbeams is a music therapy charity which last year celebrated 25 years of helping people with a wide range of disabilities across the north of England. Often working in sub-standard facilities, such as space in underused local authority or NHS buildings, their participation-based therapy gives users an important means of communication which otherwise may be very difficult.
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The site’s geology allowed the architects to both nestle the building into the landscape and offer south-facing rural views
Service users range from young children with often severe disabilities, or behavioural and emotional problems, to people with Alzheimer’s and dementia – one of the goals of special needs teacher and Sunbeams founder Annie Mawson was to provide ‘Music for Life’. Her belief in harnessing the power of music as an inclusive healing tool is corroborated by several grant funding bodies including charity sponsor, social justice charity COINS Foundation, which said the therapy “invokes a sense of belonging to a huge variety of people.”
The only missing piece of the jigsaw was a decent facility from which to operate – including the space to store and house the trust’s growing administrative functions – and this was where architect (and Annie’s nephew) Will Mawson entered the scene. While in the final year of his degree and trying to find the right topic for his thesis, he realised that his own love of music and close connection to Annie’s charity were pointing him in an obvious direction. Mawson tells ADF: “I was intrigued by music therapy – how it works, and what conditions might make it more successful.” He began researching the ideal facility to support it, using Annie’s practical expertise (she is also a harpist and singer), as well as the leading UK music therapy provider Nordoff Robbins as key sources of infor- mation: “They kindly let me have a look round their centre in London, at the time the only purpose-built centre in Europe.” With his studies having taught him that music therapy ideally required people to be “in a calm and tranquil state of mind,” he sited his ideal unit on the shore of Ullswater, the famously idyllic Cumbrian lake. This was the polar opposite of Sunbeams’ current facilities, but serendipitously, the eventual site of charity’s new home would not be far away. After graduation, Mawson began working at Newcastle practice Napper Architects. He explains how a few months later, he got an unexpected call from his aunt: “Just so you know, we had a board meeting last night, and it was unanimously
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approved that we are going to build a centre.” Despite her enthusiasm for applying his model in reality, he had to manage her expectations about the size of the challenge; at the time the charity were renting small office space in a country house and had never built a building before. However the momentum began to build regardless, with the charity’s reputation seeing it gifted a difficult site, landlocked by the M6 near Penrith, but Mawson designed and got planning permission for a scheme. Then in another twist, a further site was gifted to the charity. This one was perfect, fairly isolated on the brow of a hill with uninterrupted views into the Ullswater valley, and a 100 year peppercorn rent. Mawson says that the iterations his model had been through were a benefit, enabling the design to be refined. “Because we’d been through these processes of knuckling down and saying ‘what was it you really want from your centre?’, this final one designed itself really quickly”.
Form
Sloping down away from the A66, the site’s geology allowed the architects to both nestle the building into the landscape and offer wonderful south-facing rural views. As Mawson says, “We wanted it to appear to have grown out of the earth, so we really embedded it into the ground, for passive energy reasons as well as to help it through planning.”
Mawson explains that as the terrain “kicks up” slightly, he was able to tuck the building into the slight depression near the top of the slope, and follow the lateral curve of the site. As a result the building, already a low single-storey structure, hunkers down and becomes part of the landscape. Its north elevation is buried into the hill so that only the slate wall is visible from the grass and wild-flower covered field above, plus the tops of three hexagonal lozenge-shaped ‘pods.’ Two smaller pods house therapy and meeting space, and a third larger structure functions as a workshop and performance hall. A curved overall volume containing circulation is clad with a wall of local Cumbrian slate to the north (facing the road) and glazing and timber cladding to the south. The north elevation is broken up by the protruding central section, and the three pods – there is a recurring musical theme in the design of the building’s form, and the pods’ placement at regular intervals in the composition is one example – alluding to notes on a score.
ADF JULY 2018
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