The scheme will retrofit, refurbish and extend existing farm buildings on the South Downs coast near Beachy Head. According to the AJ 40 under 40 practice, the Black Robin farm buildings are in ‘varying states of picturesque disrepair’.
Feilden Fowles, which won the job following an invited tender, will retain the E-shaped layout of the existing farmstead, and add an extra 600m2 of gallery space and 690m2 of events space. The gallery will be divided into three spaces.
One of the gallery spaces will be climate-controlled, with the other two designed to GIS standards.
The existing buildings will be adapted where possible to make them energy-efficient heated and insulated. The practice said that some of the buildings would have to be knocked down because they were too dilapidated to be retrofitted but it would reuse the materials from these buildings elsewhere on the site.
The buildings are made from brick, flint, timber and steel with corrugated cladding and flint walls, which is characteristic of Sussex. Feilden Fowles intends to use…
