6a Architects

Steamboat Museum . Windermere

6a Architects . Windermere Steamboat Museum

The museum is organised like a small village with four structures ranged around a central courtyard.

The buildings are conceived as large roof volumes hovering over the ground and water, leaving open views of Lake Windermere beneath them. They echo the line of trees along the lakeside which frame horizontal views of the lake below the tree canopy from deep within the site.
The large patinated copper roofs are emblematic of the vernacular boat houses around the lake, referring back to regional copper mining and the great halls of Victorian engineering tradition.
Ground works take on the language of the waterfront with banked up flood defences and the existing wet dock infrastructure retained.
The composition is completed by a belvedere, linked to the exhibition spaces, which provides a vertical punctuation to the shoreline.