THE ENTERPRISE PAVILION
Client: The South West Regional Development Agency
Location: Bournemouth
The Enterprise Pavilion was built for the South West Regional Development Agency, to cultivate creative industries and stem the brain-drain of talent to London. It consists of an array of modular start-up business units wrapped around a digital imaging facilities house. The individual units are timber elements slotted into an exposed steel frame, while the facilities house is expressed as an inscrutable timber cube. Light-filled circulation slots separate these two structures, and are spanned by gantry-like access bridges, arranged around a central freestanding lift tower.
Visibility is carefully controlled such that views are created across the voids around the facilities house, fostering the sense of a creative community, and animating the life of the building. From within the units however, the sense is of looking out through the feathered edges of the building to the surrounding world. The architecture thus metaphorically expresses the ethos of the Development Agency. The building has been used by the Agency to represent and promote its activities.
The circulation atria at the heart of the building are conceived as outdoor spaces that are unheated and basically serviced, but make maximum use of solar gain, thus creating generous communal areas that foster the social life of the building and can be comfortably occupied for 80% of the year, at minimum cost. These spaces, are covered by a tent-like fabric canopy that lends the building a celebratory air evocative of its seaside location.
The building was awarded the Poole Pride of Place Award 2005.
‘…overall an inspiring result for an inspiring building in a dull environment’ (Building 19/5/2006)