presently operating without signals , the installation of traffic signals will take place once the new road through the park is constructed in its entirety .
ARCHITECT ’ S COMMENT As architects , we were tasked with establishing a high street shopping experience , rather than a solely destination-orientated retail building where goods could merely be purchased - a place which would encompass the community as the user within a setting of open , yet protected , spaces , overlooking the council-owned park on the site ’ s northern boundary .
The process that ensued was a thorough exploration of the architectural language of exposed and aggregated materials , and less aggressive ones of softer description – juxtaposed by the challenging conditions of access and orientation that the site dictated for the building . What followed was a firmed set of guidelines of unpretentious and understated definition of forms , volumes and surfaces that would form the visual backdrop to , rather than be the subject of , the functions of the building .
Site The heavily contoured site contained between its immediate suburban building fabric on its northern , eastern and western boundaries , and the urban building mass to the south presented the first challenges of orientation , scale and access to the site . It was important to establish a link between this existing built context by layering the building from a smaller and more penetrable
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