Case Study
Swansea Tidal Lagoon

Swansea has taken a step closer to the realisation of an ambitious and groundbreaking energy project, now that the UK government has approved the technology behind the proposed Tidal Lagoon.

A tidal lagoon is a U-shaped breakwater, which harnesses the power of the rising and falling tides, thanks to hydro turbines built into its walls. The tides on the Welsh coast are among the strongest in the UK. It is proposed that, by keeping the turbine gates shut for just three hours, there will be a 4.2m-high difference between water inside and outside the lagoon. When the gates are opened power is generated as water rushes through 60m-long draft tubes which rotate the hydro turbines.

The Swansea Tidal Lagoon has been developed by renewables entrepreneur Mark Shorrock, CEO of developer Tidal Lagoon Power (TLP). Once final approvals have been granted – and pending TLP’s navigation of the delicate issue of the lagoon’s likely impact on wildlife and the coastal ecology – construction should start next spring and take four years. It is Intended to be a scalable blueprint, with plans for further lagoons along the Welsh coast once the Swansea project has demonstrated its viability and sustainability.

Swansea Tidal Lagoon

The lagoon is intended not just to harness energy – at a cost of as little as 30p a person for an estimated 155,000 homes over the next 120 years – but also to enhance Swansea’s leisure offer, with an elegant visitor centre, designed by Juice Architects.

The Visitor Centre will be vulnerable to extreme weather conditions, so it has been designed with a robust outer concrete skin, textured on the outside but made of smooth plaster inside. Interiors will be of glass and timber, with a proposed ‘touch pool’ visually linked with the rock pools created by the wavebreaker/turbine wall beyond.

Client: Tidal Lagoon Power
Architecture: (for visitor centre) Juice Architects
Cost: (visitor centre) £35m; £1.3bn

Case Study
FCB centre for student life

Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios prestigious commission to develop Cardiff University’s £50m Centre for Student Life puts a holistic student experience at its core, providing for every aspect of their needs.

Part of the biggest campus upgrade in a generation at the university, it responds to students’ requests for enhanced services and improved spaces for learning and studying.

FCB centre for student life

Flexible learning spaces – both relaxed, social learning spaces plus bookable study rooms – combine with an advice bar (including financial advice, student support and administration services), careers centre, a wellbeing centre for mental health and counselling, as well as all the eating, drinking and entertainment facilities that one would expect of a 21st-century student union. Construction is due to start this year, with completion scheduled for the start of the 2019/20 academic year.

Client: Cardiff University
Architecture: Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios
Cost: £50m
Completion: 2019

Case Study
Artes Mundi, Cardiff

The biggest cash prize in the European art scene – the Artes Mundi biannual award of £40,000 – remained bizarrely low profile from its launch in 2003, until curator Karen MacKinnon took over as director for its 6th outing, 2014-2015. Her selection for that year demonstrated most powerfully the importance of the prize’s aim: to celebrate artists ‘whose work examines what it means to be human in our world and in our time’, as McKinnon puts it. The 2015 winner, Theaster Gates, went on to shake down the art and architecture establishments thanks to his unique approach to community – and arts-led regeneration in the poorest parts of Chicago. He famously offered to split the prize with his fellow nominees.

That year, Artes Mundi had more coverage than the Turner prize. Each year, the shortlisted artists receive a valuable showcase for new and existing work with an exhibition that runs up to the awards announcement, spread across two of Cardiff’s main cultural venues – the National Museum Cardiff and Chapter Gallery.

Artes Mundi 7’s shortlisted artists were: Welsh artist Bedwyr Williams, whose dystopian film Tyrrau Mawr contrasted the glitz and shimmer of a fictional speculative city set within a spectacular Welsh landscape, with the grit, pathos and banality of the lives of its imaginary citizens; UK artist John Akomfrah OBE presented his diptych film Auto da Fe, exploring the historical and contemporary causes of migration (above); Lebanese artist Lamia Joreige’s Under-Writing Beiruit film and installation looked at Lebanon’s complex history of conflict, destruction and reconstruction; Amy Francheschini (USA), through her Future Farmers collective, explored the politics of food production and migration; Algerian-French artist Neil Beloufa’s film work Monopoly, investigated how the power struggles arising in the playing of a real-estate game reflected those of real life, and Angolan/Belgian artist Nástio Mosquito presented a work that proposed a fictional African country, Botrovia, and the fantastical ‘sollutions’ proposed by its despotic leader. The winner was John Akomfrah.

The next Artes Mundi takes place in Cardiff from late 2018 to early 2019.

Case Study
Lumen Prize

Carla Rapoport abandoned a comfortable life in financial journalism to support her passion for digital art and artists. The Lumen Prize she launched in 2012 has tapped into – and helped to unite – a close-knit and collaborative community working at the intersection of art and technology, with the winning entries touring the worldeach year. It was only through visiting and getting to know Wales, while restoring her husband’s family home in the Brecon Beacons, that Rapoport realised that, thanks to internet technology, she could successfully promote global digital art without leaving the mountains.

In the first year, there were 50 works and 38 of them were (digital) still images. In 2016 there were 400, with entries so diverse they were given their own specific categories, including sculpture, games and ‘mixed reality’ (immersive VR).

Afterglow: By boredomresearch. This Mini PC Game System with won the Lumen Prize 2016 Moving Image Award. Afterglow is inspired by scientific data from mathematical modelling of epidemiology, showing the patterns of transmission of a malarial parasite on a tropical island

From the early days, thanks to a connection with the City of Cardiff, Rapoport was given a hot-desk space and office support at Cardiff Business Technology Centre, which a couple of years later, struck a deal with Rapoport and her small team. She says: ‘We curate the art in the centre and it provides our business admin base in Wales for free.’ Exhibition space has never been a problem.

‘We’ve hosted shows in Llandaff Cathedral (2014) and Cardiff School of Art and Design (2014) and ArcadeCardiff (2013).’ For the most recent awards in September 2016 – after the most successful awards night yet, in Hackney – the Lumen Prize winners were exhibited in Caerphilly Castle before going on their world tour.

Says Rapoport: ‘Wales has an extraordinarily vibrant arts community (and) ubiquitous broadband means you can live in rural Wales – where property prices are so reasonable – and still be in touch with artists in Canada, New York City, Shanghai or really anywhere else.’

The only tools Rapoport needs for her daily communings with the world of digital art are Skype, WhatsApp, Google Hangouts and – in China – WeChat.

Case Study
Freshwest Designs

Marcus Beck and Simon Macro are both Pembrokeshire lads, born and raised, but left home to study furniture design (Beck, in Manchester) and fine art (Macro, at Brighton). Macro then went to London, working for Thomas Heatherwick, before both decided to move back to Wales for the quality of life and the chance to pursue their own projects without the pressures of London studio and housing rents. They set up Freshwest Designs around 10 years ago, initially with commissions for furniture and lighting design – including a prestigious lamp commission from Moooi – but the pair are now getting more involved in public space, art and infrastructure.

Freshwest Designs

They recently created a piece for a light festival, Illuminating York, which saw them suspend 22 mirrorballs down the City’s medieval street The Shambles, supposedly the ‘oldest street in Europe’. Says Macro: ‘We work with galleries in London, Geneva, Vienna. Only in the past two years have we been doing stuff in Wales.’

Tramshed Cardiff

This includes street furniture for Colwyn Bay, a small office space that looks on to a riverside in Wales – corrugated metal walls reflect the water, while a folding glass door opens directly on to the riverbank – and they created the whole interior of the highly regarded Mission Gallery in Swansea, working with London-based architecture practice

Case Study
Tramshed Cardiff

One of Cardiff’s Grade II listed red-brick tram depots has been reinvented as a major 1,000-capacity live music, event and creative/tech co-working hub, thanks to developer TShed and architecture firm Ellis Williams – the practice that transformed Newcastle’s flour mill into the Baltic arts centre.

The first phase, the music venue, was completed in October 2015, with the Tech Hub opened in September 2016. The Tech Hub is operated by The Big Learning Company (BLC), which was looking to create a friendly co-working hub for the city’s tech and creative industries. BLC sourced furniture locally and incorporated reused and recycled Welsh products wherever possible, including vintage cinema seats.