Working with Industrial Memory

We invite you to join us for an evening event exploring thoughts on design within post industrial landscapes. 

This event explores the architectural and landscape challenges of working within post-industrial sites — places layered with memory, material, and meaning. We’ll look at how such landscapes can be regenerated to serve new community purposes while preserving their historic value with a view to protecting and enhancing their ecological value. Through case studies across different contexts, our speakers will reflect on how design can balance heritage conservation, environmental restoration, and contemporary reuse. 

Claire Fear is the founder and director of Thread, a progressive, collaborative team focussed on the cultural heritage, our human story, community value and our climate responsibility. An AABC Accredited Architect for over a decade, Claire works almost exclusively on Listed and Scheduled Monument Heritage at Risk projects, often Industrial in nature and  including the development of a strategy to even attempt the project. 

Ethics are central to Claire’s practice. She and her team recognise the profound responsibility of working with heritage, and recognise our role in balancing the authenticity and cultural value of the past,  with the urgent challenges of the climate crisis of the future and the needs of the immediate communities surrounding the sites. Thread is committed to making historic buildings not only well cared for but also resilient in the face of climate change, integrating sustainable thinking and community at every stage of the process.

She leads the practice with a creative ethos, uniting conservation integrity and forward thinking, structuring the practice to deliver thoughtful, research-driven projects, with in-house researchers and model-making capacity supporting detailed analysis and development. This enables the practice to interrogate complex heritage issues with rigour and imagination, ensuring that design decisions are firmly grounded in evidence while remaining innovative and technically grounded.

Jennifer O'Donnell is a cofounder of  O'Donnell Brown, they are a Glasgow based practice who specialise in heritage projects and community engagement and won the AJ's retrofit and reuse award last year for their project Olympia House. 

Under Jennifer’s leadership, the studio has gained early and critical recognition as the only UK finalist in 2019’s Architectural Review Emerging Architecture Awards, as a ‘stand-out practice’ in The Architect’s Journal 40 under 40 which recognizes architecture’s brightest up-and-coming talent, and as a featured practice in The Architecture Foundation’s ‘New Architects 4,’ a major publication surveying the best British architectural practices established in the past ten years. Jennifer leads a range of projects in the studio, including the community-led regeneration of the Grade A listed Govan Graving Docks, a site of national significance.

Hugo Bugg is an award-winning landscape designer and co-founder of Harris Bugg Studio, a values-driven garden design practice known for creating beautiful, environmentally intelligent landscapes that are rooted in place, rich in meaning and resilient in the face of a changing climate.

He has won Gold Medals at RHS Chelsea, Hampton Court and Tatton Park - becoming the youngest designer to win a Chelsea Gold at just 26.

Hugo designs with time, not against it - considering how light, water, soil and succession will shape a landscape for decades to come. His planting is beautiful because it is biodiverse, climateadapted and regenerative.

Projects such as Horatio’s Garden Sheffield & East, a restorative, award-winning landscape for spinal cord injury patients, and Atelier Gardens, the transformation of Berlin’s historic BUFA film studios into a six-acre creative campus dedicated to social and environmental change (both codesigned with Charlotte Harris), reflect his ability to translate powerful environmental narratives into elegant, site-specific design.

Tom Ebdon is an architect and academic who has spent the past twenty years working between contemporary architectural practice and academia. Between 2014-2023 Tom’s time and energy was invested in the establishment of a new “school’ of architecture at Falmouth University, exploring this unique geographic, social and cultural environment through the lens of radical regionalism. 

Tom has now turned his focus to the huge challenge of the climate emergency, undertaking a full time PhD that looks to explore the architectural tectonics of climate action and place. This timely research seeks to explore the potential of hyper-local biobased materials and an emerging tectonics of climate action that offer alternatives to the current defunct status quo. 

Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.

Get App

Host or Publisher O'Brien Van der Steen Workshops