Montserrat ParliamentA 'Big Roof' for Little Bay

The Big Roof at Little Bay is designed as a building that responds to its specific geographic location and is also a symbol of a significant and optimistic moment for Montserrat.

The Big Roof at Little Bay responds to the natural beauty of Little Bay and is anchored with local stone elevations, splayed in plan to capture and embrace the spectacular view. In building section, the roof profile sits against and becomes and extension to the hillside. Its ‘Big Roof’ is visible from Little Bay and will become an easily recognisable, sharply detailed roofline set against the natural hillside and a building that is a harmonious blend of form and legislative function.

Surrounding the new Montserrat Parliament, the building is woven into an ecological landscape of local flora, designed in collaboration with Chris Sealys of Montserrat National Trust. This new landscape will become in some ways an extension of the Montserrat Botanical Gardens to hug the plan, with the walls of the Parliament Building clad in local stone acting as a dark backdrop to the vibrant landscape scheme. The sculpture trail presents a fantastic opportunity to mediate between landscape and building and we hope that local artist Veronica Ryan OBE RA might collaborate and introduce organic forms.

Sitting above the Big Roof at Little Bay, a clerestory roof light allows an even, warm light to fall in the centre of the plan, whilst at the same time offering privacy to the surrounding administrative rooms.

The chamber sitting at the heart of the building offers the opportunity to capture the view when possible and in doing so embraces openness as the core of democracy and provides a setting for the youth and wider local community to engage with the new Parliament Building in an unusual way. To communicate and to indicate what a democracy represents.