Rather than placing housing and commercial ‘blocks’ next to one another we have merged the housing, library, heath centre and small theatre into one symbiotic relationship. Our answer is the creation of a Nature and Culture Frame – a three-storey sloped living roof and timber structure covering a village of activities, numerous informal spaces and an interior/exterior canal side plaza. The wooden frame and ‘Leicester red’ colouring is a reference to City’s early historic houses and those surviving in outlying villages. By densifying the wooden structure, it in essence becomes an ubiquitous bookshelf and a flexible frame for cultural and nature related events and exhibitions.
Our proposed Nature and Culture Frame combines the two types of pre-exiting urban fabric: the industrial scale developments towards the east, larger and denser buildings, with the fragmented character of Leicester terrace housing towards the west. The result is a finely tuned coexistence of apparently opposed architectural scales.
