Oscar Nolan

‘Canongate Meadery’ 2025 A stone brewing tower anchoring a timber bridge, suspended across a wetland. - The city of Edinburgh, like many old cities, exists in a situation of multiple temporal frames that lend it a mythic quality. Tasked with proposing Inhabited Bridges across an imagined wetland, the proposal for a meadery seeks to act as a gathering point within this mythic context. Extending east from what was formerly the Nor Loch is a fluid territory - sometimes wet, sometimes dry - separating the Old and New Towns. At the far end, within Canongate, a stone tower is planned, rooted firmly in the volcanic bedrock of Edinburgh. As the stone tower is built up, a well is dug down, tapping into the saturated aquifer beneath, long known to brewers as the Charmed Circle. The tower is a meadery, where honey (cultivated from the wetland flora) and water (dredged from the Charmed Circle) ferment together to produce mead. It is a place of experimental Zymology; old recipes are researched, reinvented, and renewed, and through this form of cultural archaeology, time is bridged. Nestled into this tower and propped on stone foundations, a bridge is constructed. Timber vessels are suspended across the wetland, renewing a civic commons that has been nearly rendered extinct: the Mead Hall. Spanning across the wetland, the bridge links to Whitfoord House, a veterans' residence gradually marooned by the encroaching wetland. In gathering these moments of landscape and production, the Mead Hall becomes a place of refuge, banqueting, and community. #architecture #architecturaldrawing #architecturemodel #architecturemodels @models_architecture @toffuco @architecturedotstudio

‘Urban Marshland Metamorphosis’ 2023 Collaboration with Shay Miller and James Langham

‘Shay in the Sun, After the Rain’ 2025 42cm*59cm Oil on board 4th slide - “Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway”, J. M. W. Turner

‘Canongate Meadery’ 2025 Axonometric Drawing (45-45), HB pencil on parchment paper - The city of Edinburgh, like many old cities, exists in a situation of multiple temporal frames that lend it a mythic quality. Tasked with proposing Inhabited Bridges across an imagined wetland, the proposal for a meadery seeks to act as a gathering point within this mythic context. Extending east from what was formerly the Nor Loch is a fluid territory - sometimes wet, sometimes dry - separating the Old and New Towns. At the far end, within Canongate, a stone tower is planned, rooted firmly in the volcanic bedrock of Edinburgh. As the stone tower is built up, a well is dug down, tapping into the saturated aquifer beneath, long known to brewers as the Charmed Circle. The tower is a meadery, where honey (cultivated from the wetland flora) and water (dredged from the Charmed Circle) ferment together to produce mead. It is a place of experimental Zymology; old recipes are researched, reinvented, and renewed, and through this form of cultural archaeology, time is bridged. Nestled into this tower and propped on stone foundations, a bridge is constructed. Timber vessels are suspended across the wetland, renewing a civic commons that has been nearly rendered extinct: the Mead Hall. Spanning across the wetland, the bridge links to Whitfoord House, a veterans’ residence gradually marooned by the encroaching wetland. In gathering these moments of landscape and production, the Mead Hall becomes a place of refuge, banqueting, and community. #archi #architecturedrawing #architecturaldrawing architect architecture drawingpapers architecturedotstudio @lines.drawing @opus.site @drawing.papers linesdrawing justlinedrawing @architecturedotstudio @toffuco @critday

‘Canongate Meadery’ 2025 1: ‘Quaffing Mead’ watercolour 2/3: Hand-drawn axo of Meadery overlaid with timber model 4: Assorted models 5: Fragment of section through mead hall 6: Reconstructed mead hall The proposal takes up the logic of bridging, not just as infrastructure but as social and temporal passage. It physically links Whitefoord House, a veterans’ residence slowly becoming marooned in an encroaching wetland, with the city oif Edinburgh and the New Calton Burial Ground. The wetland’s slow reclamation of the site renders Whitefoord House an island, a physical manifestation of the social isolation often experienced by veterans in the UK. The reimagined mead hall tethers the veterans accomodation to the civic facade of the high street, a space of gathering suspended between life and death, past and present. In spanning toward the burial ground, it forges a new locus of communion - binding the living to memory, and the isolated to the city once again. #archi #architecturedrawing #architecturaldrawing #architect #architecture #drawingpapers #architecturedotstudio @lines.drawing @opus.site @drawing.papers #linesdrawing #justlinedrawing @architecturedotstudio @toffuco

‘Canongate Meadery’ 2025 1: ‘Two herons wading’ watercolour 2: Part of axonometric drawing showing copper vessels extruding/ propped from stone wall 3: Model photo 4: “Little Dancer of Fourteen Years” Edgar Degas, 1880 5: Section detail through copper vessel 6: A plan for one of the first lighthouses built on screw piles: Mitchell’s Patent Screw Piles And Moorings, 1852 These two bespoke copper vessels sit off the stone, perhaps both delicately propped, en pointe, and jankily askew. Fixed to the stone walled building, and supported by screw pile foundations into marshy ground. Inside contains intimate ‘booths’ secluded rooms for drinking, eating, and talking - with views across the wetland. #archi #architecturedrawing #architecturaldrawing #architect #architecture #drawingpapers #architecturedotstudio @lines.drawing @opus.site @drawing.papers #linesdrawing #justlinedrawing @architecturedotstudio @toffuco

‘Canongate Meadery’ 2025 1: Axonometric of more-than-human life thriving under the bridge 2: Bench quarrying processes 3: Ground floor plan of wetland - under the bridge 4: Sections through viking long boats 5: Make the Bridge Firm and Steady, Jean de Bosschère, 1921 6: Lichen and plant life thriving on and around gravestone in New Calton Burial Ground 7: Salt Marsh, Eric Ravilious, 1939 8: The Bridge, Egon Schiele, 1913 The bridge avoids major interferences to the wetland, using stone footings that allow flora and fauna to thrive around them. These repetitive foundations establish a planted rhythm of wildflower beds - once tended, now overtaken. Over the years, the wetland asserts itself: wildflowers spill outward from their ordered beginnings, spreading across the eastern marsh in a creeping, blooming sprawl. Under the bridge, life gathers. The spaces beneath are understood as vital and left open to occupation. Stone offcuts form recesses and extrusions: larger hollows shelter ducks and geese, while higher pockets host sparrows and pigeons. Quarrying scars on the stone are colonised by insects, lichen, and moss. The underneath of the bridge is as alive and as important as the inside. #archi #architecturedrawing #architecturaldrawing #architect #architecture #drawingpapers #architecturedotstudio @lines.drawing @opus.site @drawing.papers #linesdrawing #justlinedrawing @architecturedotstudio @toffuco

‘Canongate Meadery’ 2025 Long Section and Plan The city of Edinburgh, like many old cities, exists in a situation of multiple temporal frames that lend it a mythic quality. Tasked with proposing Inhabited Bridges across an imagined wetland, the proposal for a meadery seeks to act as a gathering point within this mythic context. Extending east from what was formerly the Nor Loch is a fluid territory - sometimes wet, sometimes dry - separating the Old and New Towns. At the far end, within Canongate, a stone tower is planned, rooted firmly in the volcanic bedrock of Edinburgh. As the stone tower is built up, a well is dug down, tapping into the saturated aquifer beneath, long known to brewers as the Charmed Circle. The tower is a meadery, where honey (cultivated from the wetland flora) and water (dredged from the Charmed Circle) ferment together to produce mead. It is a place of experimental Zymology; old recipes are researched, reinvented, and renewed, and through this form of cultural archaeology, time is bridged. Nestled into this tower and propped on stone foundations, a bridge is constructed. Timber vessels are suspended across the wetland, renewing a civic commons that has been nearly rendered extinct: the Mead Hall. Spanning across the wetland, the bridge links to Whitfoord House, a veterans’ residence gradually marooned by the encroaching wetland. In gathering these moments of landscape and production, the Mead Hall becomes a place of refuge, banqueting, and community. #archi #architecturedrawing #architecturaldrawing #architect #architecture #drawingpapers #architecturedotstudio @lines.drawing @opus.site @drawing.papers #linesdrawing #justlinedrawing @architecturedotstudio @toffuco

‘The Geo-Hydro-Extractive City’ 2025 Geo-Extraction: Edinburgh is a city built out of stone and as such is a city that has been extensively quarried. Most of these quarries are now invisible to the eye. The stone carries with it an intense geological locality. Within the stone itself and the quarrying apparatus lies an architecture of extraction. Hydro-Extraction: Canongate saw a high density of breweries due to its specific geology. Between the hard igneous rock of the salisbury crgas and calton hill lies a saturated aquifer within a soft sedimentary layer of sandstone. This aquifier is shallow, non-polluted and easily accessible. As such the local brewers referred to the area above it as the “charmed circle”. In this way brewing chimneys became like signifiers of this ‘charmed’ groundwater, rising high into the sky marking what lies below. Chimneys signify the wells beneath. #architecture #architecturaldrawing #speculativedrawing #speculativearchitecture #drawing #architecturaldrawing @drawing.papers @act.of.mapping

‘Geo[zymo]logical Canongate’ 2025 Bridging local Geo[zymo]logies across mytho-realistic cartographies of a sometimes wet and sometimes dry territory within Canongate, Edinburgh (named by some as the Nor Loch, by others as a wetland, but retaining a multitude of names and fluid [sic.] identities). #architecture #architecturaldrawing #speculativedrawing #speculativearchitecture #drawing #architecturaldrawing @drawing.papers

‘Entangled Lines: Mapping Sectional Density of a Hedgerow’ 2023 1. First creating an accurate surveyed section drawing of a hedgerow at 1:20 2. Then annotating this drawing with lines marking natural and man-made thresholds, eg. Foliage lines, fences etc 3. Mapping the relative density of these areas 4. Isolating these thresholds and density mappings from the original drawing 5. Modelling the isolated density map as a 3D model from clay and timber battens The analytical methodology of abstracting the hedgerow first to a 2D drawing, then analysing specific features, before remodelling it in 3D, allows for architectural elements of the hedgerow to become clearer, and the spaces within the hedgerow to be visualised at a smaller scale. Group work with Shay Miller and James Langham

‘Playground Apartments’ 2023 A housing proposal in Belleville, Paris.