The authors of the Dyson School of Design project are Wilkinson Air. According to their plan, to accommodate the educational institution, most of the industrial architectural monument of the first half of the 19th century, the Stothert & Pitt plant (Newark Works), built by the famous British architect Thomas Fuller, will be demolished.
The new building of the educational institution will face the river with its semicircular glass facade, and its street facade will be a slightly complemented outer wall of the plant. The volume of the new building will be visible from behind the preserved facade of the monument, creating an eye-catching contrast between modern and historical architecture.
The city authorities approved the Wilkinson Air project despite public opposition and potential discontent with UNESCO: Bath has a lot of well-preserved architectural monuments of the 18th-19th centuries, which makes its integral fabric of historical buildings in its center a unique ensemble. Therefore, there, as a rule, they try to avoid both significant restructuring of protected buildings and the construction of pronounced "modern" buildings.
The exception made in this case may be explained by the fact that the building was ordered by the famous designer Sir James Dyson, one of the richest men in Great Britain. According to him, he would like to build in Bath - where he began his career - a school for the training of industrial designers and engineers: and specialists in this particular profile are now sorely lacking in the United Kingdom.
