Utter madness. It was just so evident right from the start that they didn’t have anything like the budget it would need to complete a project of that scale, and didn’t have jobs that were going to generate it in the forseeable future. And that would have been with a conventional build, let alone one with enormous amounts of poured concrete. Using all their own labour doesn’t reduce the raw material costs – the timber for the shuttering alone was going to eat funds. The rooftop pool – WTF? how much? And it was huge – plumbing, electric, heating and insulation – all that stuff multiples stacks up for a 500m2 (?) build.
Finger in the air, but £1m? £1.5? more? and at the end you’re next to an ugly modern housing estate, a railway and the hum of an electricity sub station. You might get the hum level down inside the bedrooms with the windows closed but you’re surely still going to hear that and train outside…
But the design if ever completed would have be incredible – the concrete work (shapes and surfaces) was absolutely lovely (though the corridors looked a bit narrow?) and the concept of the tank space (though who knows if it would actually be buildable) was super cool. But cutting access into the tank, and removing a quarter of the roof? and huge chunks of the walls? and getting clean edges to the cuts? and doing that, and removing the waste AFTER you’ve built the inside?
I’m guessing they were going to create an insulated box inside the structure – so you’d have lost the original concrete walls internally but kept the external appearance. It looked like that other water tower they looked at had done the opposite – wrapped the whole original structure in insulation which meant you lost the original appearance externally apart from the shape but they had exposed concrete in the main space ceiling. Other than the very cool curving staircases and odd room shapes a lot of the rest of it ended up looking quite bland.
