Humber centre for excellence in the built environment

The project is an educational initiative which addresses exclusion and deprivation in one of the United Kingdoms poorest cities by engaging with communities to raise aspirations in the built environment in order to ensure the development of a sustainable urban future. The project seeks to do this principally through a learning and capacity building programme, already underway, which is engaging young people and communities of interest throughout the city to raise aspirations and knowledge generally. In parallel, a series of exhibitions, lectures and workshops will be held in the Centre's Learning/exhibition space. To house these events and to act as a base for its outreach programmes the centre has commissioned a relocatable new building which will act in a didactic capacity in relation to design and sustainability. The building is part building, part vehicle, part installation art and has been designed to interact with the natural environment in an innovative and engaging manner to produce a building "exclusive" to Hull. Its design has been informed by participatory and consultative meetings between architects and community representatives. The aim behind the project is to integrate high quality architectural design with participatory methodologies - so often in practice thought to be mutually exclusive. The proposal has demonstrated thus far that the aim to reconnect communities with their built environment, in the least promising of circumstances, can result in design of national, if not international, significance.