Kristian Hyde’s project proposes a visitor experience for Stonehenge that is rooted in the landscape and history of the site. His approach explores how architecture can respond to the human condition in a profound and poetic way.
Kristian Hyde
University of Portsmouth
School of Architecture
Site model—The Chapel of the Holy Wash sits firmly on a cliff facing the ocean, amid the great natural expanse of the Gower Peninsula, a place of peace and preservation. © Kristian Hyde.
Jury
Michel Mossessian
Larry Oltmanns (Chair)
The visitor to the stones takes on the role of a pilgrim, who must enter a sacred domain as any pilgrim would approach a sacred place, with at least a modicum of acceptance, prior knowledge, and purposeful intent.
There will be no intervention, just reaction to the forces already present. The spatial theme will focus on the configuration of the path and the issue of promenade, while forms and archetypes scatter the landscape in reaction to ground forces, archaeology, and the local geometry.
The historical avenue will be the point of entry into Nietzsche’s notion of space, a force field generated by the dynamism of bodily movement. This pilgramatic approach to the stones will be a painful reminder of the weight of stone, following in the footsteps of ancestors.
Then from a festive calmness the temple would appear like scattered pebbles on the horizon, and with every footstep grow nearer.
Architecture is then involved, returned to the simple. . .
I am fascinated by the idea of the poetic, defined by the weight of truth in the work and its ability to reveal the totality of its ambition, and while architecture may still possess some of its tainted heroism, through its exhausted ability to displace space, at the end of the day the task in hand for me is to inspire space with a feeling of great power and deep silence.
An architecture that in a profound way responds to the human condition, a kind of phenomenology of spirit.
Simple volumetric presence. © Kristian Hyde.
Interior courtyard. © Kristian Hyde.
Metaphysical sanctuary section—a monumental box with one opening toward the distant stones—a transcendental space for the pilgrim to rest and be among their thoughts. © Kristian Hyde.
Behind the speaker and the cross, the ocean is framed by the window. The view changes from moment to moment and this transition gives the pilgrim a sense of the grandeur. © Kristian Hyde.
Form has a silence of concentrated reality that the visitor comes to know as presence. Sensory perception is heightened by the hidden lines of geometry and proportion. © Kristian Hyde.
Kristian Hyde
University of Portsmouth
School of Architecture
graduated with a first class honors degree in architecture from the University of Portsmouth in 2000. He then traveled to the US and Canada where he studied art, philosophy, and architecture at the University of Cincinnati. This led him to work for Anshen + Allen, an international architecture practice based in San Francisco. Hyde’s work has received high-profile recognition across national and global platforms—from winning numerous awards, features in broadsheets and academic journals, to exhibiting in the RIBA, London. Combining a deep appreciation for architecture and the phenomenology of the natural world, Hyde founded Hyde + Hyde Architects in 2006 with architect and wife, Kay Hyde. The practice references cosmology, philosophy, and nature to create spaces that consciously respond to our internal and external worlds.
