ACCUSTOM HOUSE

by Daniel L Berende

Name

Daniel L Berende

Course

BA Architecture

Accustom House is a Community and Immigration Centre that aims to explore resilient alternative and adaptive approaches to immigration and seeking asylum. The project explores how local vernacular architecture, crafts and features of the local peripheral landscape can be reinterpreted and allowed to synergise, developing a programme that strives towards efficiency both financially and environmentally. The project is an intervention on the existing Customs House and Immigration Office site in Gravesend, Kent. The programme readapts the existing outbuildings on-site to create spaces of living, leisure, education, work and social interaction. Informed by the familiarity and practicality of local vernacular archetypes such as the Oast house or the cruck frame, both the programme and architecture of the project aim to weave foreign and local communities, allowing them to accustom and support each other, developing into a synergic scheme. The vernacular Kentish Oast house is reinterpreted, becoming a pottery kiln for the workshop, an oven for the kitchen, a hop kiln for the pub and a heat source for the building.