Fife Energy Centre

Fife Energy Centre

By: Rowan Thackray
In: Commissions Industrial
2 min read
An energy-from-waste plant with a public viewing gallery, for Strathleven Group. A building whose whole job is to be liked by the people who live next to it.
ClientStrathleven Group
ArchitectOrdish & Fen
LandscapeCorrigal Studio
Other collaboratorsStruan Engineering, Pentland Civic Trust (viewing gallery)
Completed2025
PhotographedSeptember 2025
A glazed timber-lined public viewing gallery looking into a turbine hall with two visitors at the glass
The viewing gallery. School groups come on Wednesdays.
A vast clean turbine hall in painted steel lit by a high clerestory
The turbine hall from the gallery glass. Twenty-eight metres to the underside.
This building had to be photographed the way a school is photographed, because the people it most needed to convince were the ones living at the end of the road.
Perforated metal cladding in close view with sunlight passing through onto the structure behind
The skin, at about two metres. Sun through the perforations lights what is behind it.
An approach path through planting with the building rising beyond and a family walking at distance
The approach. The planting is four years ahead of the building.

The perforated skin does something no render predicted. In low sun it lights the structure behind it rather than reflecting, so from the approach path the whole mass reads as hollow — a large light object instead of a large heavy one. One frame here is only about that, and it is the one that ended up in the planning submission for the second phase.

A calm daylit control room with one operator at distance and screens abstracted
The control room. Daylit, which for this building type is the unusual part.
The building seen across water on a bright afternoon with a clean reflection
From across the lagoon, late afternoon.