Will Adams Centre

Client: North Kent Architecture Centre & RIBA

Date: 1997

The Medway estuary is a haunting and beautiful place. Wading birds gather at low tide and the night sky is dark and unpolluted. The competition called for an education centre for bird-watching and astronomy on the contaminated industrial ground of Bloors Wharf.

The Wharf becomes a third landscape, between the soft Kent landscape and the wide mudflats of the estuary. Ground from the marsh caps contamination leaving behind a landscape of swales into which willows are planted. The new topography provides a continuous landscape through a low-lying zinc-clad building and a series of spaces and gardens shielding visitors for the privacy of wading birds.

First Prize

RIBA Open Competition

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‘The winning scheme by Adams and Sutherland successfully demonstrates, in the same way as Graham Swift’s Waterland that a flat marshy landscape is as capable of expressing as much variation and mystery as the most complex urban or dramatic natural landscape, it just takes a different way of seeing…’

Rob Bevan, Building Design