Situated in Leith, Edinburgh, the site for the studio project considers a part of the existing Ocean Terminal shopping centre which is soon to be demolished. The closure of the Debenhams store after the Covid-19 pandemic, left a large portion of the north-east side of Ocean Terminal unoccupied. Therefore, a proposal was put forward to demolish part of the existing building and replace it with a new mixed-use development aimed to regenerate the area. However, in the meantime, an initiative called the Wee Hub has temporarily occupied the former Debenhams retail unit, spanning across two floors. The Wee Hub is run by the Living Memory Association who have invited various Edinburgh-based organizations to use it as their base for their community activities. This initiative has managed to give a new life to Ocean Terminal with very limited resources, demonstrating the demand for community driven initiatives in Edinburgh.
Building on the Wee Hub’s success, the studio project attempts to provide an alternative approach to development by reconsidering the need to entirely demolish the existing structure, but rather to work with the existing. To guide our design process, the studio considered the five adaptive reuse strategies by Historic Environment Scotland (HES) which are: minimal intervention, adaptation, extension, selective demolition, and enabling. From these strategies, I decided to take an approach which combined adaptation, selective demolition, and enabling as it could help improve the buildings main issues: lack of natural daylight and ventilation, lack of noise and thermal zoning, and a poor connection to the existing urban context.
My approach for the building was to provide the current building users, the Wee Hub community initiative, with functional building which improved the access to natural daylight, ventilation, interior acoustics, and remained a flexible space for a variety of community activities. To do this, I design a series of light wells and reassembled the existing façade to create new openings into the interior and allow for occupants to naturally ventilate the spaces. The exterior carpark in front of the Wee Hub (former Debenhams) was converted into a greenspace to activate the entrance to the building and positively contribute to the wider urban context. Finally, the interior was equipped with a family of flexible partitions offering various interior conditions for the occupants to customize the large open plan. These partitions were constructed using the available materials found at the Scottish reclamation yards. The terracotta rainscreen tiles on the façade were reused to make shading louvers at ground level. The removed concrete from the floor plates to make lightwells was used in the external landscaping.
