Architecture Portfolio

This was a live project to design a bell tower for St Michael & All Angels Church in Quarley, a small village in Wiltshire. The brief was to develop a concept design for a bell tower that would stand separate to the church. The winning student’s design would be used to influence the final proposal. The tower had to include a small kitchen and a disabled toilet on the ground floor, with a ringing chamber at first floor level.

Clare’s design was based on the historic use of bells to call people to worship and the way this contrasts with modern styles of worship. The design was based around the idea of a hand raised in worship to God, holding the bells in the palm, with the bones creating the required rooms at ground and first floor level. A concrete ‘skin’ wrapped around the internal structure to hold it all together and provide weatherproofing.

As the design was very fluid, there were few straight lines and working out how the walls moved to create the different spaces was a complex task. Clare developed the design through a number of hand sketches, a detailed structural model that split in half to show the section, and hand-drawn plans.

Although Clare’s scheme didn’t win the competition, she had a number of positive conversations with members of the church when they were invited to the university to see the different designs. The use of hand-drawing to develop the scheme and modelling to look into the structure helped Clare to develop these skills and produce work that explained the scheme clearly.