THE DECORATORS MARIANA PESTANA AND SUZANNE O'CONNELL ON COLLABORATION WITH COURTNEY FOOTE Inspired by the community ethos of crowdfunded initiatives and open-source sharing, The Decorators approach architectural design as a project with many active participants. When engaging public space, the London-based practice consults the broader community, often using unique ways to initiate conversation. Their built interventions are usually temporary, ranging from a scaffold restaurant on the fringe of a market, to a public canteen imbedded within a disused Magistrates’ Court. With projects lasting between one to six months, the provisional quality furthers community engagement, as the time span of the architecture reflects public need. Described as ‘urban rehearsals,’ The Decorators aim to create spaces that are at once sites of experimentation, yet also moments of storytelling, giving the public an opportunity to narrate possible futures for their city. This ability to incorporate numerous voices in a design is informed by the diversity of their own team, as the Decorators explain to Inflection how different disciplines can work together in practice:
I: I’d like to talk about the collective, which we’ve identified as transdisciplinary. How were The Decorators formed and how are these disciplinary intersections important? MP: We came from four different backgrounds; interior design, psychology, landscape architecture and architecture. We met at Central Saint Martins at an MA program called Narrative Environments, which was a program that already nurtured interdisciplinary collaborations.
When we think about the evolution of the term multidisciplinarity, it’s usually the idea that you have different disciplines working together yet each keeps the boundaries of their own discipline. Interdisciplanrity means there is a coexistence of two disciplines, so you’re working on your own while working near another. Transdisciplinarity means that you cross – ‘trans’ actually means to cross a border. So it means that you’re already operating in some other territory. I quite like the idea of crossing disciplines because it defines the movement in-between. To never be fully in your own discipline, not quite doing something else, but constantly negotiating a place in-between. It’s where you’re in no particular territory. SO: Because we’re working within the public realm broadly speaking, that’s a complicated experiment with lots of different types of people and lots of different types of voices. I think that it’s very necessary to have different approaches because public space in itself has many people operating within it. I think that’s one advantage of the way we’ve been working. I: I was hoping you would talk about social engagement, as it is an element within many of your projects. Ridley’s in Hackney for example was a restaurant within a market, but at the same time it was a curated event. SO: Architecture doesn’t need to exist in isolation; it has a place to create social interactions. So the thing with Ridley’s was we didn’t really know what we were going to build or what we were going to do, but we spent a period of time – three or four months – at the market, talking to people.
I think that the transdisciplinary quality of The Decorators is really important, because it has always made us doubt the practice methodologies implied in our own disciplines. We had all worked to some capacity before, so it has been very important to constantly reassess our learnt approaches to a particular project by having an exchange of ideas.
We were trying to understand the day-to-day rituals and the day-to-day interactions that happen there. We wanted to avoid being an isolated structure restaurant on the site. We wanted to find a way to interact and be part of those day-to-day social dynamics.
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DustDecorators The Eyes
Inflection
