Marine Terminal Amlwch
The site comprises a two storey building located on the southern shore of Porth Amlwch. Completed for the Shell Oil Company in 1976, the building provided a mix of office and workshop services to support their single buoy mooring of tankers offshore, and the associated pipeline infrastructure. Architects Design Group, established by PPRIBA Gordon Graham, completed the building design along with the new harbour at Porth Amlwch, and the tank farm at nearby Rhosgoch. The refurbishment project is commissioned by Cyngor Sir Ynys Môn - Isle of Anglesey County Council, and the project lead is Ramboll UK.
Marine Terminal is a distinctive feature on the south side of the harbour, sitting directly above the Grade II listed Old Dry Dock. The expressed cast in situ concrete structure, fair faced blockwork walls, and expression of secondary elements and services using form and colour mark this building internally at least as being of late modernist heritage, however the exterior is much more contextual, traditional even, in its formal and material language.
An asymmetric Welsh slate pitched roof blends traditional materials with the continuous glazing of the rooflight. The blank gables are suggestive of agricultural structures, and the dormers within the rooflight are almost cottage-like in scale. This is a building marrying modernist construction and planning to a contextual regionalism, a complex ‘folk-brut’ composition with many qualities not perhaps readily appreciated from the current conditions.
The site is situated in a Porth Amlwch, the harbour district of a town with a rich history. In the C18 and C19, the copper mines on nearby Mynydd Parys Mountain were the largest in the world, and the town’s small ship repair industry evolved into ship building industry in the C19. Copper lining to the hulls of naval ships gave them a decisive advantage of speed in the water, and therefore the global impact of this small island town can be appreciated through this material which has been used to define new architecture in the context, such as the extension to the Sail Loft and the Copper Kingdom centre.
The refurbishment works are designed to improve thermal performance, accessibility, and to replace defective elements such as the continuous glazed roof, dormers, and balcony, and to upgrade outdated elements such as fixed building services. Despite the mass of the cast in situ concrete and masonry elements, the roof structure is surprisingly lightweight and carries only a small amount of mineral wool insulation in parts. Upgrading the thermal performance, adding insulation externally to the walls and to the roof structure changes the overall thickness of these elements, and care has been taken to maintain the distinctive silhouette of the building. Key moves include removing the continuous glazed roof element
To the north elevation, a copper sheet roof emerges from under the relaid traditional Welsh slate roof; interpolating the buried history of Mynydd Parys Mountain and the broader traditions of slate quarrying in Wales. Dormers are also clad in sheet copper, breaking the rigid horizontal banding of the existing north elevation, helping to soften the mass. The gables are pronounced as bookends through the use of a more textured render, and the introduction of new windows to emphasise their mass.
The south elevation features a modest area of copper roof aligning with the two building entrances. These entrances are further emphasised by new windows at first floor. The workshop units are provided with shopfront style openings, with louvres at the head to conceal ventilation intake and extract. The eaves is dressed with timber cladding, a detail designed to reduce the blankness of the existing elevation, in a manner reminiscent of vernacular buildings.
