Studio brief
"As soon as the stranger arrives at the unknown city and his eye penetrates the pine cone of pagodas and garrets and haymows, following the scrawl of canals, gardens, rubbish heaps, he immediately distinguishes which are the princes palaces, the high priest’s temples, the tavern, the prison, the slum. This - some say - confirms the hypothesis that each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences…”
Italo Calvino
Studio One proposes buildings which have a deep appreciation for time, place and belonging.
We have been approached by an artist-led creative organisation called Knot Works, who would like us to help them develop a new cultural building in Rye, near the Sussex coast. Knot Works facilitates artists’ development through hosting events, workshops, studios and exhibitions. They provide space for people to gather and cultivate a community for artists and creative practitioners.
Rye is a town and civil parish in the Rother district of East Sussex, two miles from the sea at the confluence of three rivers: the Rother, the Tillingham and the Brede. An important member of the mediaeval Cinque Ports confederation, it was at the head of an embayment of the English Channel, and almost entirely surrounded by the sea. But more than this, Rye is a town of traces of the past: ruined buildings, forgotten paths, and ghosts.
The Mermaid Inn was built in 1156 and is one of Britain’s most haunted buildings. A female figure dressed in grey haunts the upper part of the building, while in rooms 10 and 18 a fading man has been seen entering and leaving - often through a wall. Whilst we may not count ghosts amongst our Clients (they don’t pay invoices very well), what would it mean to design a building to amplify the presence of the characters that move around, over, under, and even through the spaces we share?
We will be exploring the tools we have as Architects to engender a sense of identity for the people we build for. We will investigate ways we can use buildings as cultural anchors, to spark an affinity between architecture and its constituents (past and present…) to develop a new sense of who we are and where we live.
We will focus on storytelling and representation: how do you communicate the buildings you propose, and give them presence beyond the paper they are drawn on. We will teach you how to work persuasively and descriptively, and use your ideas to open up new conversations about who we are and where we are.
Your learning objectives will involve developing a deep appreciation for Rye's historic and cultural context, applying architectural thinking to address the challenges of adaptive reuse and integration, exploring design processes that generate proposals for buildings in real settings. You will immerse yourself in a place to tell stories that will shape the evolving narrative of a deeply historic town, while expanding the breadth of your architectural vocabulary to make a building that becomes a setting for its own lore and myth.
Credit: Kieran Wardle
Details
Course | |
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Tutors |
Holly Jean Crosbie |
Where | Goulston Street |
When | Tuesday and Friday |