Electric Daisy

Overview

Electric Daisy was a live-brief project delivered as an extension of the Sustainable Urban Design module. The site was a dilapidated and underused car park in the centre of Derby. The client was Down to Earth Derby, a community interest company with ambition, a lease, and very little capital.

The problem was not simply one of design. A community interest company cannot survive on goodwill. It requires income, and it requires that income to arrive from more than one direction. A single-use scheme would have been elegant and fragile. Students were therefore asked a harder question. How might one site, at one moment, support several distinct economies at once?

The answer they developed was a "multispace". The scheme layers four programmes across a single plot: a community garden producing local food, a beer and food garden, a hireable venue for private gatherings and public events, and an outdoor stage for live music (Fig 1). Each programme carries its own revenue model. Each occupies the site at a different hour, season, or intensity. Together they insulate the CIC against the failure of any one of them.

That proposition is entrepreneurial before it is architectural. The students arrived at it themselves.

The Brief

Teams paired Level 6 Architecture students with MSc students in Sustainability and Environmental Management. The pairing was deliberate and slightly uncomfortable. Undergraduate designers worked alongside postgraduate specialists in environmental systems, carbon accounting, and community sustainability. Neither group held seniority over the other. Each held knowledge the other lacked.

Simon Foote Architect, a local practice, joined the studio as a design partner. The practice brought buildability, cost realism, and the discipline of an office deadline. Down to Earth Derby brought the operational truth of running a site on thin margins.

Proposals (Fig 2 — an example proposal) were required to work across four registers at once:

• Spatial design — masterplan, circulation, structure, and material strategy.
• Environmental performance — biodiversity, water, growing capacity, and reuse of existing fabric.
• Programmatic layering — which activity occupies which ground, and when.
• Revenue model — how each programme earns, and how the programmes support one another.

A proposal that satisfied three registers and failed the fourth was not considered complete.

Pedagogic Structure

The module operated as a co-creation process rather than a conventional studio. Students did not design for the client. They designed with the client, and with the architect, over successive working sessions on site and in studio.

Concept development was staged as negotiation. Students tested programme mixes against the CIC's operating constraints, then revised. Growing beds competed with seating for ground area. The music stage competed with the garden for acoustic peace. Bar service competed with family use for atmosphere. Every gain was paid for somewhere. Resolving those competitions was the substance of the learning.

Interim reviews were held as working meetings with the practice and the CIC present. Students were required to defend spatial decisions in commercial and environmental terms simultaneously. The postgraduate cohort was obliged to translate environmental analysis into spatial consequence. The undergraduate cohort was obliged to submit form to scrutiny. Both moved.

The outcome was a masterplan and a set of concept proposals that the CIC and the architect could act upon directly.

Outcome & Impact

The student proposal was adopted by Down to Earth Derby CIC. The scheme was subsequently delivered on site.

The renovation was completed with sponsor funding of £200,000. That funding was attracted, in significant part, through the public profile the project generated. The work received national and regional press coverage. Electric Daisy is now an award-winning venue and an established fixture of Derby's civic life.

The commercial logic of the scheme has held. The site now generates income through four distinct channels:

• Produce and participation through the community garden (Fig 3).
• Food and beverage trade through the beer and food garden (Fig 4).
• Venue hire for private gatherings and public events (Fig 5, 6).
• Ticketed and promoted events at the music stage (Fig 7).

This diversification was the students' central contribution. It converted a derelict asset into an operating business with a resilient income base, while retaining the CIC's community purpose intact.