Khalid Abunayyan
Breena Foigelman
Our site sits within a slate quarry in Wales—a landscape shaped by extraction. This concert hall project redefines preservation not as the act of leaving something untouched, but as an active engagement with material and place. We are deliberately disturbing the site, extracting slate from the quarry and using it to form the exterior of our building. The extracted portion is reconfigured into a stepping profile and a carefully dug trench, which allows the building to cantilever over the quarry. This strategy ensures that, despite our interventions, the site remains otherwise undisturbed. In doing so, we confront the idea that preservation means keeping things as they are. Instead, we propose that to preserve the slate is to work with it—to quarry the quarry—allowing its legacy to continue through architecture.
Plan view of concert hall and 5 profiles
Section through reception space
Rendered view of massing