A Musical Retreat and Performance Hall for Balloch
An exercise in folding and unfolding.
On the southern shores of Loch Lomond, thick, heavy walls fold and wrap to create two distinct buildings atop a small mound. They reference the heritage and context of Scottish castles in rural landscapes with thick walls, splayed windows and a direct pragmatic response to the surrounding site.
The residential building has thick straw bale walls for the children to inhabit, regardless of where they are from and their living situations they all have the a room of their own. A public courtyard connects the residential to the performance hall, and serves as a transition space from the public to the private.
The performance hall is enveloped by a wall of service and circulation space, which it intersects at one point to offer views of the surrounding wood and river. Furthering the project’s cultural agenda, the hall is entirely flexible for a variety of performances, not only for the charity, Sistema, but for the people of Balloch.
The project developed from a material-first approach, mapping locally available straw left-over from wheat harvests in the Central Belt and Lower Highlands of Scotland. By using 1.2m thick hyper-bales to create thick walls, the retreat starts to reference historical Scottish castle walls. The historical castle was another jumping off point for the organisation and layout of the two buildings. The buildings respond to the four edges of the site with thick walls and openings to create internal space and frame external space. By unfolding plans of existing castles to extract the wall, and then folding the wall to create spaces and organise “service walls” from “walls of accommodation” two buildings emerged. Both buildings are contextually sensitive; energy efficient with low embodied carbon; and designed in the mind of the end users, as a child would cut and fold paper to discover.
