Our winning design for a visitor centre serving Cumbria’s nuclear power station industry combines powerful narratives about landscape, nature and nuclear fission to create a strikingly modern design. Nu-GEN, Westinghouse and Toshiba appointed K2 to design a building of international significance in the heart of the Lake District National Park. As a gateway and interpretation centre to their £9bn development, the building provided a range of social, teaching and conferencing facilities, but was also intended to be a legacy project for the area. K2 employed landscape artists to help us interpret the dramatic backdrop of the Cumbrian Mountains into the design of the form of the building. The concept of fission splits the building into two elements that frame the rising and setting sun, the heart of our solar system and the source energy that feed of all life on earth through nuclear fusion and fission.