Sustainable Design: architect’s response to Easdale Island brief

As we’ve reported, Eilean Eisdeal has just won £130,000 as a finalist in the Green Streets award scheme. Part of the Community Company’s development plan for the island is building a Visitor Lodge. This will support the island’s economy in a gentle, low key way. It will enhance the quality of experience open to visitors to this uniquely shaped little slate island. It will add significantly to the visual character of the place. This is a well judged and sensitive initiative.

Eilean Eisdeal commissioned Argyle Architecture to prepare a revised set of proposals for a smaller lodge than first envisaged. It has made its choice from a set of three design options submitted by the architect – who has a manually progressed online slideshow presentation that’s well worth a look (linked below).

It shows what an architect does in preparing such a site specific design. It presents the brief given by the Community Company – and it shows the three resulting design options submitted  by the architect, with layouts. It considers the sustainability crucial for an island community.

The site zone chosen in the settlement area offers magnificent views. The only problem the island will have when the Visitor Lodge is built is likely to be negotiating with visitors who lock themselves in and refuse to go home.

When you look at the slideshow:

• click on the first image to enlarge it – but  not adequately;
• then click on it again – possibly twice – to bring it to screen size and make it legible;
• when you want to move on, just shut that screen down – which will return you to the slideshow;
• then use your forward arrow key to bring up the next image and click on it as before to being it into a screen size window
• and keep going.

For your information, the community chose Design Option C. What would you have done? If you’re a would-be visitor to the island, which one would you like to stay in? Have a browse through Argyle Architecture’s presentation slideshow.

Now – VOTE in the Argyll Sustainable Design Forum’s online voting in the 2009 Sustainable Design Awards. Closing date is 27th November.

You don’t have to live in Argyll to vote so, whether or not you do, if you haven’t voted yet, refresh your memory on the finalists in each of the 3 voting categories by clicking on our coverage of each – linked below. Here you can find out more about them and see the four photographs published on each entry.

Sustainable Design Awards categories and finalists are:

• Small scale residential category (single houses to schemes up to 5 units)
• Large scale residential category
• New build non-residential category (public buildings)

You will also be interested in the initial article on Argyll’s new Sustainable Design Awards, on the Sustainable Design Forum whose initiative has launched them and in other articles on sustainable design projects – all in our archive of articles on sustainable design projects.

The photograph at the top shows Easdale Island seen from the shores of its neighbouring slate island, Luing and is taken by Norman Bissell of the Scottish Centre for Geopoetics on Luing.