The Emotion of Building
One of the main pleasures and privileges of what we do as architects and makers is confronting the constructed idea for the first time. Distance and time inevitably separate the original idea from built reality. Depending on the circumstance, months or even years can pass by. Faint memories of cool pencil lines drawn on paper in a coffee shop or on a cold train platform can make the whole experience feel like a distant dream. The concept for our home in Broad Haven was to create, through the material of concrete, an embodied notion of solidity and endurance, responding to the harsh landscape of West Wales' coastal fringe. The site conditions we build upon and within, paradoxically, embrace and resist our architecture in an interplay between natural forces and built form. The experience of ‘first contact’ is nothing more than exposure to the awesome, elemental and timeless power of architecture.
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