The Architects’ Journal Architecture News & Buildings
About the School of Science, Engineering and Environment
Location Salford | Courses BSc (Hons) Architecture, MArch | Head of school Laura Coucill | Full-time tutors 10 | Part-time tutors 7 | Students 204 | Staff to student ratio 1:12
Postgraduate
Daniela Atzori
Course MArch
Studio/unit brief Infrastructures of Heritage and Decarbonisation: Speculating on the Manchester Ship Canal
Project title Urban Bio-Loop
Project description Responding to the problem of decarbonisation of the Manchester Ship Canal, this project proposes to address the Stanlow Oil Refinery through a constructed carbon sequestration landscape formed by wetland and woodland, as well as two man-made hills acting as ‘service areas’ for a closed-loop hub of food production, consumption and recycling. The natural draft cooling tower on site is reinvented as a community hub with its upper floors dedicated to food production through new technologies such as automated vertical hydroponic farming. The ground floor is an ‘all around’ food hall and market with an external square to host monthly markets. An on-site anaerobic digester plant processes all food waste of West Cheshire and Chester, producing biogas through 16 digesters in the landscape. Stanlow is reconnected to the Ship Canal via a cycle path.
Tutor citation Daniela’s project is a speculative yet pragmatic approach to our British Council-sponsored decarbonisation of post-industrial heritage programme. Her architectural method is reflected in a plausible engineered solution: inserting a vertical hydroponic farm inside a former cooling tower, together with a landscape strategy. Derek Hale, Vijay Taheem, Laura Councill, Fadi Shayya