Project description

Civic Stone–Kirkgate Square is a project for a new public space in Leith, formed by an ensemble of civic buildings (containing a theatre, a library, social-care offices, and social housing). Through select urban moves, the scheme activates the latent civic quality of 156 Constitution St, reintegrating the site with the city.

The design is interested in the natural theatricality of the city, and seeks to embrace this theatre across scales, from the plan of an apartment to the massing of buildings. 

Materially, the project experiments with load-bearing Darney sandstone as a local, low-carbon construction resource. Following research visits to Hutton Stone, the design embraces material unpredictability in an effort to increase quarry efficiency and reduce waste.

Unfolded Elevations of the theatre and mixed-use building expand
Unfolded Elevations
Building In Stone Today

Darney sandstone is a local construction resource to Edinburgh. Research visits were made to the quarry and to Hutton Stone to try to better understand its character and the processes it undergoes. 

Perhaps the most important lesson was that stone is a material with variety. Each block extracted from the face is a different size, so treating it like an industrial product will only lead to unnecessary waste. The scheme therefore tries to incorporate this inconsistency, accepting variance and minimising processing.

The project is interested in stone as a low-carbon, load-bearing material; treated not as precious cladding but as a means to make durable structures.

At Darney quarry there are 72 acres available, 10 acres have been used in the last 100 years of quarrying.

Stacked Stones expand
Stacked Darney sandstone offcuts
The Site

156 Constitution St is a rare break in the street frontage at the top of a main artery in Leith. There’s a patch of scrappy grass, two telegraph poles, and tarmac. 

It’s contained on three sides: by the graveyard wall to the north-east, by Kirkgate Tower to the north-west and by a service yard to the south-west. Buildings back onto the site but display no civic frontage, instead we find blind façades and small openings. 

Along Constitution St, there is only tram traffic resulting in a quiet site with very predictable rhythms. 

Church Fragment Axonometric expand
A fragment of the demolished 19th century St. James Chapel, axonometric at 1:10

On the graveyard side, a family crypt attaches itself to the boundary wall: an open-air, stone house of the dead. Harmoniously placed next to it is a ghostly silver birch, its bare branches talking to the weathered sandstone.

Behind these two characters looms Kirkgate Tower, a building which seems to relate more to the tombstones than to any other part of the context.

This superposition of a delicate natural form over orthogonal, man-made elements holds some power. As Phil Christou claims in lectures on Siza, through inserting straight lines into a landscape, one highlights the natural and the existing topos.

A birch tree, a family grave, and Kirkgate Tower
The site lies behind the graveyard wall; a birch tree, a family grave, and Kirkgate Tower
Festive Quiet

“Whatever it is that creates that elusive bond between strangers taking account of one another in a public space was present here but in such a criss-crossing of currents that the whole place seemed electrified. And so, although we had entered a recess, a sort of giant pit, Il Campo also appeared, like a lit-up stage, to be suspended. To cross it is to take part in a centuries-old choreography, one meant to remind all solitary beings that it was neither good nor possible to exist entirely alone.”

–Hisham Matar, A Month in Siena

 

‘Civic architecture is informed by the rhythms of civic life; one of the primary characteristics of civic ground is a tacit, latent quality of imminence. Hans-Georg Gadamer called this quality “festive quiet.”’

–Patrick Lynch, Civic Ground

 

“The town is not really like a natural phenomenon. Rather, it is an artefact–an artefact of a curious kind, compounded by willed and random events, imperfectly controlled. If it is related to physiology at all, it is more like a dream than anything else.”

–Joseph Rykwert, The Idea of a Town

Siena, Cartier Bresson
Siena, Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1933, V&A
SiteUsageSketches expand
Everyday theatre
The Scheme
Planometric
Civic Stone: Kirkgate Square
Written Use Diagram
A guide to Kirkgate Square
Sections
(Above): Long section through theatre. (Below): Section through Kirkgate Square
A Theatre

A long, street-like theatre bounds the square to the south-east. Occupying a former shop, it bridges Constitution St and New Kirkgate, lining the new through-route. 

The design of the theatre is intended to intensify the experience of a performance. The stage/street is flanked on either side by red-stained timber scaffold seating, the audience as much a part of the show as the actors. Meanwhile, the plan dramatises a progression from the New Kirkgate entrance, through the stage and out through the porte-cochère, onto the square. 

The regularly-punctured square façade mediates between theatre and public realm. The internal stage is set up as a mirror of the through-route outside. In this composition, the movement of an actor inside might follow that of a pedestrian outside, the city becoming an actor in the performance. Or at least one can hope...

Its structure is conceived of as a sandstone vessel, an 'intelligent ruin', which may host a range of functions in the future. Its form is intended to be strange, freeing it from the fixity of functionalism. 

Inspiration was taken from Japanese Kabuki theatres, Lina Bo Bardi's Teatro Oficina, and Florian Beigel's Half-Moon Theatre.

As Asja Lacis writes on the Proletarian Theatre in her memoir, "The theatre moved out onto the street and the street moved into the theatre."

 

Exploded Theatre Isometric
Structural exploded isometric of theatre
A Library + Social Housing

To the north of the square, there is a mixed-use building containing a library and a collection of social care offices on the ground-floor, with generous social housing units above. 

The building is janus-faced, looking with a closed face to the graveyard, whilst opening up to and embracing the square. 

Planometric of the Mixed-Use Building
Flexible Apartments

The scheme features large social housing units, able to accommodate alternative modes of living to the traditional nuclear family. The plans are simple: a series of rooms, some larger than others, are anchored to a structural sandstone spine. In fitting with the rest of the scheme, rooms are defined by their character rather than their function: larger rooms are arranged along the more public, south-facing loggia, while more intimate rooms are located to the north, on the graveyard façade. Either may be used as bedrooms or living spaces depending on the users' inclination. 

The plans are inspired by the work of ARU and Robin Evans' essay, "Figures, Doors and Passages." To crudely paraphrase, Evans frames the corridor as a segregational device, intended to keep all members of the household separate. By contrast, in having to pass through a sequence of rooms, the enfilades of Palladian villas made bodily interaction unavoidable. 

A housing plan centred on a series of communal halls holds some sense of city within it. Moving through these communal spaces we perform the same silent, dialogical interaction as in a public square.

Working out housing plans
1:50 working drawings and model fragments of a housing floor
Civic Elevations

Much attention has been paid to the buildings' civic elevations. They are mediators between the public and private elements of the scheme and must participate in the cultural life of the city. 

A colossal order differentiates the ground-floor civic spaces from the social housing on the upper floors. Meanwhile each apartment sits behind a continuous loggia, offering a buffer between civic and domestic, and providing solar-shading for its south-facing orientation. On the north-facing cemetery elevation, windows are punched into a sandstone wall, respecting the silence of the graves.

Beam lengths vary across the south-facing elevation to minimise waste at the quarry and accept the material's natural inconsistency.

The building's mass steps up away from the tower in a neighbourly fashion.

1:50 working elevation model
1:50 working elevation model
Unfolded Elevations
(Above): Unfolded elevation of mixed-use building. (Below): Unfolded elevation of theatre
Technical Section + Bay Elevations
1:50 technical section + corresponding bay elevations
South exploded ago
Structural bay isometric (south façade)
Column facade exploded axo
Exploded south façade
North bay axo
Structural bay isometric (north façade)
Window exploded axo
Exploded window isometric (north façade)
Quarry Processes diagram
Diagrams of quarry processes for south façade construction (above) and north façade construction (below)
Chiselling
Working stone
A Birch Tree

A slender birch tree holds the centre of the scheme. It mirrors its sibling on the other side of the graveyard wall, setting up a renewed dialogue between a city of the living and that of the dead. 

Its fragility is superimposed over the orthogonal stone elevations, embracing their differences.

Inspiration was taken from Joseph Beuys' work, 7000 oaks. Beuys planted a young oak tree next to a basalt boulder, juxtaposing their differing timescales: while the oak tree will grow, perish, and eventually disappear, the basalt will remain largely unchanged for millennia. When the tree is gone, the basalt will record its presence. In Kirkgate Square, the ruinous stone buildings will record the former presence of the tree and a way of life.

Tree under changing light
The birch tree, a day
Beuys Tree
View of square from inside a passing tram
A view of the square from inside a passing tram
UnfoldedElevations expand
Unfolded elevations
Appendix 1 – Miracles + Pinos Precedent Study (with Delan Aribigbola)
Appendix 2 – Traversing Paris

In October 2023, I spent a week in Paris, moving between three ‘modern’ public buildings: Quai Branly (Jean Nouvel, 2006), Palais de Tokyo (Lacaton & Vassal, 2002 & 2012), and the Bibliothèque Nationale François Mitterand (Dominique Perrault, 1996). Influenced by Bruno Latour’s “cheminement,” I recorded the city through a montage of images, ephemera, and notes. This physical traverse was complemented by an exploration of written Paris, taking in a range of thinkers but focusing on Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, and Giorgio Agamben. Stitching the two traverses together produced deep readings of these enigmatic buildings, and the dreamt city in which they sit.

Dissertation Scan
Scan of dissertation section – a continuous traverse with accompanying 'postcards'
Student list
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