Riverside Centre, Colchester

Co-living is steadily becoming an attractive typology beyond our major cities. Smaller regional towns and cities are now seeing the potential for regenerative urban renewal where conventional C3 use schemes have foundered for want of basic economic viability. We were asked by our client to develop designs for a meeting with the local authority to introduce them to an unfamiliar land use and set out the benefits that such proposals would offer, not least the opportunity to repair a blighted and semi-derelict set of buildings, provide a genuinely activated and publicly accessible ground floor area and a landscape that would knit the proposal into the surrounding context. The architecture aims to be place specific rather than generic, again, reinforcing a sense of belonging.