ADS2: National Park
Benjamin Price
Ben is a Londoner through and through. He studied his undergraduate BA at Cambridge 2014-17. Then spent a year working at BDP on various large scale projects, before starting at the RCA. His work is research driven, particularly centred around public works, co-operative housing, participatory design and community engagement. Across his time at RCA he has explored how legislative and civic frameworks can be the starting point for creating beneficial shared social spaces.
Ben has worked on a range of projects exploring these ideas at RCA: a meanwhile use project with StART Community land trust in haringey, a project with the CAN70 collective in Barcelona and for my thesis project Ben explored how the Northern Forest conservation area planting can become a vehicle for socially beneficial spaces.
Writing is also a crucial part of Ben’s architectural practice. Ben has written distinction level dissertations on Alvar Aalto’s emerging style, Swiss Co-operative Housing and Mies Farnsworth House supposed Universality.
Northern Forest Corridor
This project explores the Northern Forest, a massive tree planting initiative in the North of England. It investigates how ecological conservation like this can be a vehicle for socially beneficial spaces.
The aim of the Northern Forest is to plant 50 million trees in a vast 43,000 square kilometre region spanning England, from Liverpool to Hull. Tree planting like this is the only way of meeting CO2 reduction targets for 2050 and ameliorating England’s environmental damage.
The areas covered by the Northern Forest are not just some of the most tree scarce in England but are also some of the most deprived. The Northern Forest should seek to address both of these issues.The Northern Forest represents a chance to utilise environmental conservation as a vehicle for social change, by providing beneficial spaces to these deprived communities.
My proposal is to condense this planting to a kilometre wide strip that cuts across the region and its urban areas. This act would create dense woodland and bring the benefits of forest directly to demographics that would normally not have access.
The forest is specifically centred in the edge of city condition, shown here in Leeds. It is in this suburban-rural zone of overlapping green-belt, housing, transport infrastructure and farmland that there is the required space for dense woodland and the needed adjacency to the suburbs required for the implemented programmes.
The typology of the Northern Forest develops a methodology for placing these programmes and spaces into the woodland of the Forest Corridor. The project proposes controlling the design of the forest by creating clearings and openings, in which a range of community programmes can be hosted.
The creates an interplay of existing fabric, building and forest. The buildings sit on the boundary between forest and clearing, mediating the relationship between the two. The clearing ‘room’ is the central space of the project and the buildings and spaces are defined in relation to it.
The Northern Forest Corridor is developed as a masterplan working in relation to a series of experiential images.There is a responsive and productive relationship between the two methods of representation. The painterly images drive and act as expression of the forest masterplan, describing a series of relationships between its components.The project provides a possible way of making ecological conservation a fundamental part of how we produce our shared spaces and not something outside of the built, inhabited environment.
Maps of England with Tree Cover and Deprivation — These maps reveal England’s low tree cover and the deprived areas of the north. The highlighted Northern Forest should seek to address both these issues.
The Northern Forest — The map shows the scale of the Northern Forest and the project's proposed condensing of the vast forest into a 1km wide strip.
Typology of Northern Forest Corridor — The typology of the Forest Corridor is a design of clearings, forest, existing fabric and architecture. It is defined by a series of interrelationships between these components.
Existing Fabric to Forest — The Northern Forest Corridor is placed ontop of the everyday mundaity of Leed's outskirts.
Forest to Clearing — The typology makes clearing 'rooms' that are permeable to the forest and are the container of the social programmes.
Clearing to Forest — The Building and Forest together form the boundary of the clearing and define the relationship back to the forest.
Building to Forest — Where the structure of the building continues out into the woodland, an ambiguous overlapping zone of building and forest is created. Programmes spill out from the interior into this transitionary space.
Clearing to Clearing — The relationship between conjoined clearings is mediated by architecture. The design exerts its greatest influence at the boundary spaces of the typology.
Experience of Clearing — The design of the typology creates shared social spaces within an idyllic forest setting. This act will create elevated moments of social activity, embedded within the ecological conservation.
The project is described by a series of relationships between the components of the typology; existing fabric and forest, forest and clearing, clearing and building , building and forest.
