Clarity: A repository for Fleetwood’s Lost Thoughts

The act of place-making can form criteria for conducing various town investigations of different proportions, enabling architecture to benefit from promoting people and their localities. The Beeching Report resulted in Fleetwood becoming disconnected and suffering from placelessness, ‘Clarity’ aims to promote people and setting in order to reverse the effects of Beeching’s mandate.

How can contextualism intervene to generate prosperity through broadening the townscape, considering history and people as pivotal to re-establishing a successful living and working nerve centre? This project focus’ on creating responsive dementia design through different lenses, forming a keen interest on memory of ‘place’ and how we consume and preserve a settlement’s heritage.

In addition to creating comfortable environments for those with dementia the project’s objective is seated in understanding the contributions architecture can have with regards to raising awareness of dementia and the condition’s ailments. We study how architecture and contextualism can revise the way in which memory of place can be maintained and the significance of maintaining these memories due to their capacity to delay the onset and promote healthier thoughts for those already living with dementia.

Our outputs create an extension to the town of Fleetwood’s nerve centre, creating an urban plan that focuses on way-finding and the towns historical lighthouses with a new ‘Clarity’ lighthouse. The housings designs and interiors reflect on the ailments dementia patients face and focus on inclusive design as a solution to comfortable and secure living. The proposal finalises on a repository of memories on the seaboard, a structure that houses the nautical memories of Fleetwood and provides a deep chamber of reflection to the visitors, in which memories are deeply stored to preserve heritage.