Upcycle your building too!
We’ve been invited to work with leading Cornish zero waste CIC, Upcycle Kernow, to look at improving the energy efficiency of their workshop building so that it is comfortable throughout the year and allows them to continue to offer a community workshop space accessible to everyone.
Model of original 1941 RAF Portreath dispersed accommodation garage.
The current building was built in 1941 as a single storey garage, part of the dispersed accommodation for RAF Portreath. Built of single-skin concrete blockwork with piers along its length, the walls support a lightweight steel-trussed, asbestos sheet roof. It provided a suitable environment for housing vehicles in the ‘make do and mend’ era of the second world war, but it is too cold for its current use as a community workshop. Over the last few years Upcycle Kernow has been finding the temperatures in the winter and summer are no longer bearable and the building very hard to heat.
Upcycle Kernow run textile workshops and clothes-swaps, as well as a tool library as part of the repair cafe network. At the same time that their existing building was built, war time families were encouraged to reuse and adapt old clothing and visit ‘clothing exchanges’. The current climate crisis is challenging us to rethink waste as a resource again, and Upcycle Kernow provides a space to bring communities together. Upcycling the building will provide a comfortable and light-filled working environment.
Model of possible adaptation to provide light-filled workshop space
Working towards a circular economy, we will reuse or repurpose those elements that can not be integrated into the new building. We will adapt the building so that it can grow and change as the organisation develops. By starting with the ‘fabric-first’, we will improve its thermal performance and then add energy efficient heating, water and lighting solutions.
Upcycling the building is in principle the same process as Retrofit and this old RAF building provides a great opportunity to test out ideas that can by applied to homes and buildings around Cornwall, with the added challenge of keeping a sense of it’s original use, while making it future-proofed for the ongoing upcycling work of Upcycle Kernow.
Funded by the Cornwall Council C&IoS Community Capacity Fund, we are a loose architectural collective, including Frances Crow of Crow Architecture, Andrea Lane of Lane Architects, Janie Hinton of Janie Hinton Architects and Laura Battersby, of Studio Battersby Edgley, working with Jo Godolphin of Pink Pebble to deliver a feasibility study and works up to RIBA works stage 4.
