Designing a New Distillery Town for Lismore, Scotland.

Through rigorous research of Scotland’s historic drystone architecture, this project proposes a modernised form of a crofting township, centralised around a distillery. This required tackling the project at three different scales simultaneously: the street, the masterplan, and the distillery.

The construction system developed at the street scale sought to turn the defensive drystone architecture of Scotland’s past inside out, taking the timber structures typically found on the inside of thick masonry walls and placing them on the outside, creating a far more hospitable environment. After determining the form of the blocks used through digital testing, prioritising structural efficacy, the system uses adjustable, saleable concrete block moulds with limestone aggregate extracted on site as a key component of the concrete mix. These blocks then interface with radial laminated timber beams, creating the dwellings facing out towards the Scottish landscape. In turning defensive concrete architecture inside out, space was created within the streetscape to store whiskey.