China Meiville's The Scar

A first attempt at modelling a story, to explore how literature might let me develop a second architectural voice for the coopted spaces of the project. This model takes its influence from China Meiville's floating boat city of Armada in his novel 'The Scar'

Thomas Hillier

I have referred previously to the fantastic work of Thomas Hillier, and specifically his incredible 2D/3D models which were the inspiration for my own piece on transgression and the fair [and seemingly the inspiration for one in two models throughout the SSoA MArch this year]

Thomas process builds on narrative, and is therefore extremely relevant to my own studio investigations this year. However, I find it problematic, and think that it raises many fundamental questions about architecture as a whole, and about student work in particular.

Hillier's works sits at the very edge of architecture and art, flirting with transgression - as with the fair. His narrative response is richly metaphorical, but the programmatic parts are uncommunicated. This raises the question as to what makes architecture, and it is my personal feeling that programme is key - without use all we design is colossal sculpture.

Hillier's projects therefore provide an interesting starting point for my own investigations, but his construction of architectonic metaphors from literature is a methodology I would like to challenge. I want to explore ways of using narrative to drive programmatic architecture, but what form that will take is unclear.

Borges : Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Was reading this last night; a really interesting short story about the creation of a fictional world, through the rigorous production of a detailed encyclopaedia of it. The discovery of that encyclopaedia ultimately leads to the history and reality of the narrator's world being usurped in favour of the more clearly structured Tlon - the fiction becoming reality.

This explores typical Borges ideas of stories within stories and worlds within worlds, and as with much of his work, has significant architectural implications. Especially, in the context of student or paper architecture.

My dissertation looked at the fictional world of the drawing being 'real' through its evocative power to draw eople into its world, often through lack of clarity. Borges seems to suggest the other, that a project with enough detail could actually overtake reality. It's an idea that reminds me of Lawrence Miles' bottle universes.

It also strikes me that the possibilities of digital technology could ultimately lead to this kind of mass acceptance of an alternative reality as truth being a tangible possibility - the spread of fallacious online rumours of celebrity deaths being accepted as facts is perhaps a parallel example; the scale of the Encyclopaedia of Tlon being the only real difference.

Foundations

I thought it would be interesting to try and map the recurrent themes throughout the projects I've worked on at university and beyond, so that I can then use this final studio project as a culmination of some of them, and try and tie others together.

The most prominent ideas are to do with time; either architecture that changes and responds with it, or the alterations made to buildings over time by use and misuse.

Loughborough's Den of Iniquity

The idea of transgression and the fair developed into an architectural installation - a building with a programme at the periphery of decency, but left undefined, which then opened out an blossomed with the licentiousness of the arrival of the fair.

The Fair and Transgression

This model looks at the fair as a site of transgression, where social and architectural boundaries break down and the normally unacceptable becomes commonplace. The fair infects the normality of the architecture, changing those spatial qualities and adding new programmatic layers.

This idea of appropriation and co-option is key to my thinking for the main body of the project, and parallels Hill's creative users.

The model itself is heavily indebted to those of CJ Lim's studio at the Bartlett, and in particular to Thomas Hillier's exhibit at last years RA Summer Exhibition - by far the stand-out piece for me, and a really interesting exploration of narrative as architectural process.

Thomas Hillier - The Migration of Mel and Judith