Situated on the periphery of the town, straddling an industrial, agricultural and suburban context, the site in effect marks the threshold between the countryside and townscape. The proposed building is industrial in its use and material expression, yet refers to its domestic neighbours through its scale and form. Its footprint is shifted to meet the street edge, acting as a visual ‘gatehouse’ to the industrial park within, but also as a mark of its wider ‘gateway’ location at the very built edge of Coalisland.

The owner–occupier company is a specialist electrical contractor, with particular expertise in solar technology and lighting. Our proposal seeks to directly carry the functional specialism of the building’s host through to the form and expression of the architecture. It was our suggesting that the building should be a signifier and exemplar of the particular technological and visual craft of its owner, while also remaining contextually reflective of the typical forms of its edge–of–town, fringes of the countryside location.

The building’s upper storey, housing offices and meeting space, is conceived of as a skewed abstraction of adjacent pitched roofed semi–D’s, it’s ridgeline twisted diagonally to allow its solar–panel clad roof to catch south–east sunlight at the optimum angle. Materially, it is designed as light–weight, ephemeral object absorbing and emitting light depending on the time of day – a curious translucency revealing activity within by day, a beacon marking the edge of the town after dark.