With current planning policies pushing to project our countryside housing, development both in the private and public sector, has been encouraged towards ‘brownfield’ or inner city urban sites. These sites can involve complicated social infrastructural and community issues. Each site is unique. Each has its own problems and potential. Each site generates its own particular response.
An urban block may be appropriate - a terraced street may be the solution. Whitehall Square and Templemore Avenue, both in central Belfast, are two quite different solutions responding to their particular location and surrounding context. One is an urban block fronting a busy street with a quiet courtyard behind. The other recreates the Belfast terrace street and achieves appropriate urban densities well beyond that which would have been anticipated by the local authority.
One lesson we have learnt is that any inner city urban development needs buy-in by local communities. Community consultation at an early stage is essential to allow the solution to be successfully integrated into its neighbourhood.
These selected project include a range of development scales, complexities and responses to specific briefs and client aspirations.