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This is our entry to a competition with an unusual brief. A visitor's centre for the Medway marsh and estuarine habitats is combined with an observatory and a museum devoted to Will Adams, the Kentish founder of the Japanese Navy. The drystone gabion walls of the building sit in the landscape like archaeology. The interior accommodation is organised around a sheltered courtyard, lined with woven reeds. The rooms have pocketed spaces penetrating the massive thickness of the walls with framed views out. A shallow ramped approach leads to the roof, opening up and establishing a relationship with the wide horizon. On this sits the yellow steel disc of the observatory, like a setting sun come to rest at the edge of the water. The project also includes an extensive landscape proposal for the landward approach, threading through a Kentish landscape of orchards, lawns and water, making careful references to Japanese landscape design tradition.
