Flourish: Youth Community Centre

Strategies for Sustainable Living (student category): highly commended

Architect: Amelia Wronka

This proposal is a youth community centre which aims to support young people physically and emotionally. It aims to aid education on sustainability through renewable energies on site and grow a thriving community through engagement supported by food and product market stalls. The community hall and greenhouse are fashioned from two existing building on site, a car dealership and gasometer, reusing the buildings and beautifying the area while the library is a new build. It is proposed that KENOTEQ bricks, developed in Scotland and are 90% recycled construction waste, are used throughout the proposal in the library, paving and seating. Use of this material offsets the carbon of the building during its construction process and with renewable energies has led to a carbon negative building.

The judges felt that this was a great example of a landscape architecture project which created fun and open places between buildings. The judges commented that the idea of developing a garden like this and the reuse of unusual structures, such as the gasometer, was really interesting.