MA PORTFOLIO by Ila Colley

ILA COLLEY • THE ROYAL DANISH ACADEMY OF FINE ARTS, Denmar k (2018 - 2020) | (Y4-Y5) MA Political Architectur e: Critical Sustainability THE UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, UK (2015 - 2018) | (Y1-Y3) BA Architectur e with Distinction 20 | 21

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S2 | Y 5

S1 | Y 4

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S1 | Y 3

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Y1 & Y2

The Ha

20 | 21 S1 | Y 5 S2 | Y 5 S1 | Y 4 S2 | Y 4 S1 | Y 3 S2 | Y 3 Y1 & Y2

A project with with Dhamintha Wickremasinghe. The transformation of an old Societ collective farmhouse/school into an exhibition space with studios and lodgings for resident artists, as well as guest rooms. There should be a focus on horse breeds in the local Latvian context. This proposal is inspired by the horse, from research into horse-human dynamics, farming to chivalry, the tools of this relationship, from dominion to companionship. We designed around the horse tack, leatherwork and joints, imagining the existing house as the horse body to be dressed, our extensions and interventions are the augmentation that puts the horse to use, with new purpose. Our intervention used the dynamics of the four components of the horse harness.

• 20 | 21

rnessed House

• 2 0 21

The Harnessed House Omuli Museum of the Horse

In the harness, the communication component (bridle, bit, lines) acts to signal and direct the horse, the draft component (collar, hames, traces, trace chains) directs and bears the forces that pull the load, the stopping and backing component (breeching band, quarter straps, pole straps, breast straps) distributes and stabilises forces during acceleration and deceleration and finally the support component (back pad, billets, belly band, spider) connects all these together.

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From these roles we assigned functions from the brief, and often their tectonics are linked to the forces and connections of their harness component. Following the brief, the horse/house is not static, but moves forward in time with this design and its phasing. To conjure this image, and as aesthetic motif that finds its way into the architecture, we reference Muybridge’s famous Horse in Motion photographs and the staged mechanisms that were needed to capture them.

Walking trot diagram Light well morphology from horse head shapes

Plough and share mark and focus the plaza. Hay racks from rural context inspire cabin.

4 year phases - incoming summer artists ▲, year-long artist residents =▲, changing public exhibition ○, seasonal artist residents and summer festival. The stairs and walkway exhibition element is tectonically inspired by the horse’s bit, and the skeleton of the mouth.

Muybridge’s arrangement of cameras to capture horse in motion. Shutter mechanisms triggered as horse moves across 24 the trip wires become the moving blinds across the sunspace.

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The Harnessed House Omuli Museum of the Horse

The communication component now steers the direction of the Harness House project, the future of the exhibition and artistic programme through interaction and communication with the public. Much of this architecture has to do with allowing the public insight into the artists’ practice through use of walkways, stairways, overlapping routes and overlooking vantage points. The exhibition halls become triple-height spaces that connect carefully with other private and production areas. This architecture has a language of tension, vibration, movement. Chimneys and furnaces become pulley systems that display work in progress from he studio down to the exhibition halls.

The support component is the component that maintains coherence between both the house / horse and the other components. We have designed it as a heavy concrete element that is imprinted with the existing architecture, but extends to reach new functions and ties the other new interventions. It is the unifying feature between new and old, and the basis on which the draft architecture sits (communion / dining cabin). It also has a connective role in terms of heating the vast spaces in the main house, forming a trombe wall which uses passive solar heating techniques with a south facing glazed sun-space in front that collects heat, is stored in the wall’s thermal mass and gradually released over the course of the day.

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The Harnessed House Omuli Museum of the Horse

The draft component bears the force, in this sense we deal with the body’s needs: these spaces are the communal dining cabin and the sauna. They manifest through timber architectures that are balanced between heavier structures, in the case of the sauna this is situated in and out of the old ice house. The cabin is inspired by hay rack structures, hangs from the support walls around the plaza and underneath it a ploughshare indicates the use of the land, with the opportunity for communal gardens in the grounds beyond. Where the horse is feeding into the main building, here the sky light resembles a horse getting shoed by a farrer.

cabin axo NW

The stopping and backing component suggests speeding up and slowing down, modifying spaces based on 4 gaits of the horse. The feature pinch points and moulded entrances, as well as the moulding and shaping of light. The horse gaits correspond to certain speeds and movements of the horses feet, and these patterns are also present in the architecture itself, from windows to hand rails. These mainly feature in the exhibitions and artists rooms and are meant to provoke deeper interaction with the existing spaces through parasitic intervention. sauna axo

cabin axo SE cabin plan 1:200

cabin section 1:50

20 | 21 S1 | Y 5 S2 | Y 5 S1 | Y 4 S2 | Y 4 S1 | Y 3 S2 | Y 3 Y1 & Y2

A two year post-graduate degree exploring architecture’s complicituous relationship with political structures and processes. As students we are encouraged to investigate and challenge the role of architecture in enforcing or transforming a societal order. What can design do in pursuit of resilience, sustainability and development? The program is structured annually, with a research-driven first semester following fieldwork, and a studio-based project development in the second semester. Tools and methods evolve in relation to the context of concern, with the scholarly and the practical equally engaged. Alongside lectures, workshops and fieldwork, open discussions, “polysophicums,” enable the collective close-readings of texts and architectures; overall a cross-pollination of academic thinking and design experimentation characterises the PA:CS specific practice of Co-evolutionary Project Work.

• S1 | Y5

• S1 | Y 5

Anarchy and Old Lace

The research phase of this project investigates the historic lace industry in the French town of Calais, which progr

rammed the city’s social and political cohesion for 150 years via a constellation of ideologies, actions, concerns, relations and inhabitings.

• S1 | Y 5

Anarchy and Old Lace

The Calaisien lace story begins with the illegal movement of English workers and their machinery from the tulle community. To Calaisiens, the design and production of lace celebrated a shared knowledge and creativity, concre effect in the industrial-era workers’ struggle.

town Nottingham to Calais. The city was transformed by lace; new spaces, tools, traditions and languages, bodily and spoken, constituted the advent of a lace etised in a beautiful and valuable commodity. My fieldwork inquiry traces the lineage of lace from its clandestine arrival, its customary transition, to its galvanising

• S1 | Y5

Anarchy and Old Lace

Lace was like a source of energy, a feature that narrativized labour relations, memories, emotions. The lace-work all evoke a psycho-city whose divisions are cut from liminal lace. The material still forms a conceptual outline to t

ker’s fluid compartmentalisation of home and work, their allegiance beyond workshop to workforce, as well as the faux domestic spaces of the workers movement, the city as it lines many windows, despite the steady decline of the industry and final acquiescence to cheap, automated competitors in China.

Psychogeographies of lace: The lace producing Leavers machine programming the city built and social fabric. Pleats: from production line to playhouse. c. 1900-1940

• S1 | Y5

Anarchy and Old Lace

I discovered that recently the lace architectures of Calais were used as shelter by displaced people which had s factory structures have been gutted and embalmed, razed to make way for new eco-housing development, or securitised landscape. The beginnings of a project brief unfold from notions of disrepair towards rebuilding a co

sparked a solidarity squatting movement. For a while, these interiors provided a common project of repair-work for squatters and the displaced. Now, these old left as an overgrown façade. Public life in Calais has stagnated; both Calaisiens and the transient population are motivated towards isolationism in this highly ollectivist attitude from a shared terrain, alongside new shared practices and concerns.

• S2 | Y5

20 | 21 S1 | Y 5 S2 | Y 5 S1 | Y 4 S2 | Y 4 S1 | Y 3 S2 | Y 3 Y1 & Y2

• S2 | Y 5

The Radical Raccommodeuse

THE RADICAL RACCOMMODEUSE: Welcome to the Repairground. Some years ago, we discovered a practice, that of repair, through which we could rekindle th valuable material, we now attend, together, to what is broken. In-between, there had been a moment of freefall, the terrestrials who co-existed in this town had b conduct, taking inspiration from cabaret culture, that invited disorder and diversity into civil society. With this cabaret conduct, and this repair practice, a community

Pari

and the green flow of knowledge through digital and sensory realms. (exits stage left, a minute passes and the Cabaretier enters stage left, laden in lace) THE CABARETIER (COMMUNICATOR) So, yes, a costume change is allowed. How tiring to wear only one mask! We can thank the cabaret for its many disguises, each ironic yet faithful. Here in the Repairgrounds, where we learn to mend, where we mend and re-make, review, resist, organise, speculate, we must also represent and communicate, to those in the next workshop making noise and never closing the curtains, to those in the other Repairgrounds, and to those who aren’t repairing. Discourse flows better between the dressing and undressing of argument. But first, a story about cabaret, remembered here in Calais from the lace-worker’s struggle as places to meet, laugh, vent, and share ideology and strategy. The first cabarets were essentially taverns, offering food and drink, with musical or magical entertainment. With the evolution of the ‘cabaret artistique’ in Paris, these venues became vessels for fierce social and political satire, visited by patrons across the social strata.3 A decade after the Commune, in the 1880s. the city had undergone surgery to prevent insurrectionist barricades, forcing dissidence underground. The shadowy lanes of Montmartre hosted the underbelly of Parisian society, renown for provocation and parody, critiquing the rich and powerful as well as middle-brow culture.4 To enter the cabaret was to subject oneself to critique, as well as participate in the critique of others. In popular memory, the cabaret is associated with lavish licentiousness or seedy indulgence, rather than the power of its alternative political discourse. Songs from the cabaret could be slanderous or rallying and were passed orally in streets or cafes, a kind of people’s newspaper, provoking close surveillance and suppression from police. In the cabaret, dissensus was expressed through dialogue between audience and performer. The response of those watching was the other half of the conversation, co-constitutive, so the show should never be didactic. Just as we do not take the performer completely seriously, we cannot take ourselves seriously either, though we will pretend, for the sake of the show. We embody these agonistic roles in order to work things out, relieved of the preciousness of self-identity. The owner of the famous Chat Noir, one of the first of the bohemian cabarets, used spoofs to induce facetiousness, even faking his own death for audience intrigue. The ‘10 Commandments of Cabaret Life’ illustrate the performance of the audience member, “no. 6. Time your noisy interjections so they erupt precisely where they don't fit. This contributes enormously to enlivening the program.”5 What a chaotic community the cabaret could be! A deviant bag of shabby poets alongside virtuosos, industrialists, dancers…

he routes of solidarity that were well-trodden in the old Calaisien world of lace. Where once Calaisiens had related to each other through the production of this been deprived of their vocation or their mobility. Repair includes action and emotion, it is caring about. We did not simply arrive here, we derived and fostered a y took shape, claimed sites and made tools for the people to engage in discourse and make direct, democratic decisions. Are you curious? Let’s pull back the curtain. THE RADICAL RACCOMMODEUSE (from offstage)… machinists too…

THE ARCHITECT (from offstage)… artists sitting beside engineers …

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Lisa Appignanesi, The cabaret (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2004), 41. Ibid, 15 from Munich cabaret Simplicissimus Künstler-Kneipe in ibid, 63

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act I_dissensus

(the Radical Raccommodeuse enters stage right. She is wiping her hands on her apron as though she has just wheeled herself from the underbelly of a car, or finished washing the dishes. She makes her way downstage to where the time clock shoulders the boards, and she docks her card, performer side up, in slot 0)

THE RADICAL RACCOMMODEUSE (MENDER) (addressing the audience) Well, good evening to all of you! (she gestures with palms upward) For those of you new to the Repairground, let’s begin with a thought about community. We might call this gathering an event of community. Each of you sits next to another distinct individual, and another next to them. Is it this proximity that makes a community? Is it the fact that if you were to turn and speak to your neighbour, you would be able to communicate through a common tongue? Is it the sense you might share common goals or opinions? Or is it the binding words of the story of an originary togetherness?

fig. 1 THE RADICAL RACCOMMODEUSE

I sense we no longer find these questions useful, as they belong to the discussion of a mythic and static identity. Instead, we have come to recognise community as acts of sharing ourselves, as singular beings, something only possible at the limit of self and other.1 We are able to share ourselves, experiencing the alterity of the other, as it meets the alterity of ourselves.2 Therefore, I doubt this will be a monologue; I see some of you already making your complaints and your responses known, and in this, let us revel. (she pauses for a second, then retrieves a chair from the wings. She unfolds it and sits down) So let’s think about beginnings, which is not a myth but a record. Some years ago we discovered a practice, that of repair, through which we could rekindle the routes of solidarity that were well-trodden in the old Calaisien world of lace. Where once Calaisiens had related to each other through the production of this valuable material, we now attend, together, to what is broken. In-between, there had been a moment of freefall, the terrestrials who co-existed in this town had found themselves in a struggle with external forces that deprived them of their vocation or their mobility. The situation principally generated callousness, though many experienced worse repercussions. (she fishes from her pocket a wrapped sandwich, which she eats slowly between sentences) This is not a situation that is fixed, yet we do not regard anything as being fixed, as a binary. Repair includes action and emotion, it is caring about, it does not reach a summit nor find an exit. We did not simply arrive here, we derived and fostered a conduct, taking inspiration from cabaret culture, that invited disorder and diversity into civil society. With this cabaret conduct, and this repair practice, a community took shape, claimed sites and made tools for the people to engage in discourse and make direct, democratic decisions. For those who are curious, tonight will constitute a sketch of this mending practice, and this cabaret conduct, and we will reflect and speculate on the ways they have been tested in the physical fabric of our city, the conduct of our bodies, the electric patterns of our minds

Jean-Luc Nancy, and Peter Connor, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 32. Ibid, 33

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THE CABARETIER … policemen, professors, all jostling for a decent view of the stage;6 mutating between adversaries and comrades, sans any clearly prevailing vectors of opposition. This was cabaret at its most progressive, a conduct of critical response to both world and self. Yet cabaret couldn’t always hold its diversities in equilibrium, occasionally falling prey to nationalist rumblings and ethnic hostilities,7 when performances manage to contrive consensus, and become dogmatic. At rare moments, cabaret made a foray into conventional politics, for example when the owner of Chat Noir called on Montmartre to elect him mayor and declare their independence, though ultimately it wasn’t to be... (the Cabaretier flourishes her lace shawl and tiptoes off stage right) THE RADICAL RACCOMMODEUSE (enters with hands in pockets, speaking as though in mid-conversation) It was a time of continual unrest in France, to which the cabaret became a mouthpiece. In our industrialised town of Calais, the ideas of anarcho-syndicalism became popular during this era, inspiring lace-workers to act against the state, politicians and bureaucrats, towards systems of cooperative economics and workers’ direct democracy. So they built the Bourse du Travail, the trade union congress, a monumental translation of underclass dissent from the cabaret to a more sober and pragmatic organisation, a crystallised collectivism. Now it stands cavernous and quiet, like our old lace factories were before we reimagined them as Repairgrounds. We now act as guardians rather than producers, yet the Repair Confederation shares an ideological affinity with these lace-workers, combining their efforts for selforganisation and direct action with the celebratory agonism of the cabaret. Alas, we find ourselves in a wholly changed economy to the anarcho-syndicalists. We tread the post-industrial terrain of late-capitalism in which labour, the reproductive struggle of subsisting, previously limited to repetitive exertion in the factory or office, now pervades the human faculties of cognition, creativity and political expression.8 The cultivated human, rather than skilled body, is the primary commodity. We push back against this individualist model of high-innovation, high-consumption, and instead for a collectivism that rejoices in caring for the neglected or dysfunctional. Here, repair pursuits that would usually be outsourced by manufacturers, or attempted in an oftengendered private sphere, are shared and exchanged within the community, where their value creation can be properly recognised. Our acts of repair range in scale and ambition from precise tinkering with motherboards to interventions in urban and social fabric. (exits) THE CABARETIER (enters) We can read the playfulness of the cabaret from its spatial dynamics and aesthetics. There were already images attached to the idea of repair: from wastefulness, cracked screens, the mutated landscapes of the Anthropocene, the user-friendliness of consumption, a static freefall into undesirable future, but also patchingup, making-do, a kind of steam-punk, post-apocalyptic bricolage. Developing an aesthetic to activate our caring for and repairing is useful if it remains somewhat fluid, evocative rather than reductive, or prescriptive.

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19th century France.9 The imaginary of the period was intrigued by ideas of corporeal unconscious, the base instincts of the body, like the response of automata to its mechanical configurations. It was feared that these movements triggered a primal response, inducing hysteria in the audience.10 Fear of mind control is no less potent now when we consider the plasticity of our cognitive patterns to the codes that dictate information retrieval online. It isn’t a stretch to imagine that the intelligent system that now confronts the wider world is biological-you-plus-the-software-agents,11 who are like modern-day magnetizers. We must remember, though, the potential of cabaret to inspire critical responses, we might even say that when it begs imitation, it is no longer cabaret. Another cabaret aesthetic is possible, in place of hysteria and corporeal shocks, and perhaps I’m not to one to speak further on this.

Appignanesi, The cabaret, 89 Ibid, 58 Pier Vittorio Aureli, “Labor and Architecture: Revisiting Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt,” Log, no. 23 (2011): 99.

Critics of the historic cabaret feared contagion and imitation. The performance aesthetic had become characterised by tics, jerks and grimaces, inspired by the public interest in psychiatric theory and stimulus-response physiology in late

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(the lights begin to flicker and brighten, a commotion can be heard in a corner of the room. The Cabaretier shields her eyes. Elsewhere in the building a low whirring and a pop as the electrical system overloads, printers go offline, computers hibernate. Footsteps, then muttering and jostling, a few more figures join the audience. The lights bleach the room, the Cabaretier retreats and exits. Lights dim again)

act II_disposition

THE ARCHITECT (DESIGNER) (enters with a notebook and a glass of water. Those close to the stage might notice prompts scrawled on the back of her left hand) Here we are within the lace fabric of Calais that consists of lasting stuff: brick, mortar, steel, timber. The spatial disposition of these buildings was rather one-dimensional, it motivated lace-making, a labour as a life-force. By disposition I mean, well, the way ‘active’ form can impose a field of potentiality onto space, can offer a repertoire of game-play.12 THE CABARETIER (from offstage) Oh yes, just like how the original disposition of cabaret was constructed through an appropriation of marginal or abandoned space, embellished with a bricolage of church candelabra, old clubhouse paintings and medieval weapons, thematic and scenographic in all of its zones, from the stage… to the lavatory!

9 Rae Beth Gordon, "From Charcot to Charlot: Unconscious imitation and spectatorship in French cabaret and early cinema," Critical Inquiry 27, no. 3 (2001). 10 Ibid, 523. 11 Andy Clark in Warren Neidich, "From Noopower to Neuropower: How Mind Becomes Matter," in Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics. Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information, eds Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich, (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010), 565. 12 Keller Easterling, "Disposition," in Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics. Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information eds Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich, (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010), 255.

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THE ARCHITECT Yes, individual rooms told stories. Yet as a whole the cabaret was a nonsense of salvage and parody, which acted as cultural props for wide-ranging commentary. In order to produce sense, architecture must admit the forces of nonsense,13 we might take this from Deleuze. As itself a work-in-progress, our Repair architecture attempts to demonstrate its transitionary character. It is dispositional in that it contains information which is shared with the user in order to gain feedback. Investigating the remit of aesthetics, as distinct from active form, you could ask the question, how does democracy taste to the individual?14 Political or ethical transformation through aesthetics is usually a tangle of individual judgement and collective feeling, and therein lies potential. As opposed to matters of taste, aesthetics denotes an unlocking of private judgement to a collective perspective, a political capacity that truly humanizes the beautiful and creates a culture.15 Aesthetics can exercise resistance through its subversive and slippery nature. In the context of the factory, we might have spoken about resisting biopower, defined as techniques for the subjugation of bodies and the control of population. Instead, the ‘edufactory’ becomes the location of concern, especially considering our adoption of repair as a re-education of the city. The edufactory concept originally described higher education as producing the new cognitive workers.16 The form of labour students would now undertake had subsumed previously independent realms of political thought, cooperation and social exchange into its production of economic value.17 This type of immaterial production can happen anywhere, anytime, feeding the precariat. (the Architect rolls a screen onstage and motions to the wings. A short grinding sound as a projector is lowered.) In the 60s, English architect Cedric Price drew, somewhat inadvertently, a blueprint for the edufactory. His project ‘Potteries Thinkbelt’ superimposed a modular, mobile education network onto Staffordshire’s industrial heritage with the ambition of designing indiscriminatory education for wage-earning students. The project’s use of free space and flexibility facilitated the flow of market demands into socio-spatial form.18 The architecture could be populated by a flux of situations, presentations, meetings, performances, in hindsight perpetuating the novel public and communicative mode of production under late capitalism.19 The concept of ‘noopolitic’ goes further in describing new cognitive subjugation, which includes the mediation and control of brains operating in unwitting collaboration,20 a kind of malleable mass intellectuality.21 We are increasingly docile, plugged into a flow of algorithmically promoted information, exporting our self-reflective capacities into our external hardware.22 If we understand that a principle role of government is to police and maintain

isian cabaret

fig. 5 Cedric Price, Fun Palace, London, 1960-64. Interior perspective.

13 Hélène Frichot, "Stealing into Gilles Deleuze’s baroque house," In Deleuze and space, eds Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 65. 14 Russ Castronovo. Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1. 15 Arendt in ibid, 6. 16 Aureli, “Labor and Architecture,” 117. 17 Ibid, 99. 18 Ibid, 102. 19 Ibid, 106. 20 Hélène Frichot and Sara Vall, "Urban Biopower Stockholm and the Biopolitics of Creative Resistance." Field: a Free Journal for Architecture 6, no. 1 (2015): 52. 21 Lazzarato in Neidich, "From Noopower to Neuropower,” 545. 22 Frichot and Vall, “Urban Biopower,” 52.

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fig. 2 THE CABARETIER

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a sensibility among its people,23 this can now be attempted through sophisticated influencing of our brains by intensifying select stimuli and making it user-friendly,24 a kind of cognitive ergonomics so-to-speak. An example might be patterns of undeclared, targeted political advertising. In the face of this, we prefer to engage the idea of dissensus rather than resistance, rather than naming what can be a slippery multi-form antagonist.25 So, we attempt to create architecture that stimulates dissensus through a lateral dispositional shift rather than inversions of a preceding system.26 A deviation from existing patterns, to some extent an improvisation, a gesture that frees itself from the plan, like the co-evolving responses of jazz musicians to their fellow players.27 This artistic disruption to the sensible hopes to de-automate perception28 by creating something unfathomable to bio or noo control, from our own bio and noopower. For us, a cabaret conduct engenders a more organic terrain of brains engaged in processes of confusion, critique, clarification, contestation. As in Cedric Price’s project, receptivity, performance and play are important to how we use our Repairgrounds, but we have sought after an aesthetics independent of the market, instead privileging the cognitive faculties of people, not as commodities, but as motivators of spatial agency. It’s an architecture of varying resolution, with some elements highly specified, while other zones left abstract or in-between states. And of course, nothing here is fully finished or cleared away, each iteration is a conversation with a previous state. Performativity is integral to our cabaret conduct, yet along with moments of reveal, it is possible to conceal, to veil, drape, to rest and regroup backstage. Perhaps we could call this gesturing an articulation of peculiarities, which is in essence the articulation of a community, an inscribing act whose ultimate meaning is infinitely deferred. The refusal of the definite demonstrates the political urgency of a community in momentum, and its need for continuous description of the peculiarities of that moment[um].29 Any and all of you who participate in the Repairgrounds have a role in its articulation, so architecture is a mode of community self-description which includes the forwards, backwards and downwards looking of the present moment. (the Architect switches to the next slide)

fig. 6 Building section, Maison du Peuple, Brussels, designed by Victor Horta.

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Rancière in Neidich, "From Noopower to Neuropower,” 580. Ibid, 551. Easterling, "Disposition," 264. Ibid, 264 Neidich, "From Noopower to Neuropower,” 572. Ibid, 578 Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 76-81.

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We take a cue from ‘The Houses of the People,’ initiated by the Belgian Workers’ Party at the end of the 19th century, whose dramatic and celebratory articulation combined neo-Baroque and Art Nouveau influence with allegorical workerist scenes and an insurgent socialist program.30 They are attentive to peculiarities, which are expressed through ornamentation at the level of structure as well as the dressed surface. Focusing resources on small-scale grass-roots organisations meant the Workers’ Party could make their presence known in the city by offering its people moments of exuberant spatial experience. The Bourses du Travail movement in France embodied similarly radical politics, but their monumental classicism was only sometimes infused with a flourish of Art Deco. In the Calaisien Bourse, lacemaking reliefs and insignias are simply inserted into its surfaces. But we motivate that when iconography is freed from permanence, it can become active, so we’ve explored an ornamentation that follows our iterative repair practice. Visual signification is placed at locations of high maintenance, for example the frescoes we paint on our stages are repeatedly trodden, worn out and re-imagined. Ornament is integrated into a mobile and practical architecture, where it builds a disposition, mediates faces and orientations, or nooks and exchanges at the junction of surface and structure. Ornament is rarely out of reach, and existing at an interface with the body means inciting care from the user, and care between its co-users.

fig. 7 The grand dining room at the Maison du Peuple, Brussels, designed by Victor Horta.

This labour of remedial re-imagining is integral to how we operate as a community, it’s a part of the discourse. We are trying to deviate from a monetary understanding of labour creating value, or at least prioritise the value created in exercising curiosity, collaboration. This value, paired with a renewed custodianship of the material, attempts an economy oblique to the ruling one. This is of course challenging, but represents a general ambition. Ambition demonstrates both grandiosity and vulnerability, the cultivation of a complex, often chaotic, multi-scalar aesthetic, is purposeful, it is like a dare, where the rigidity of community becomes receptive again. (the Architect closes her notebook and wheels her screen offstage) THE CABARETIER (carries a table lamp under one arm, already lit up, and sets it down centre-stage) Let me take scale as a segue then, and zoom out to think about the city. A bit like the organisation of our old trade union congresses, we established here a confederation of Repairgrounds, autonomous in their domain of repair but in close alliance with each other. To assess and share the state of our practices we host monthly reviews in the Repairground for those at Electronics, quarterly showcases here in the Wardrobe for any members of the confederation, and regular assemblies and referendums to progress issues raised during these performances. Our shared repair practice potentializes a repair praxis through which concerns in the community and the wider city can be addressed. In this, we are testing the city as a possible scale at which to generate progressive, post-nationalist politics.31 So, we take the neutral concept of the municipal and attempt to transform it into a radical unit for developing social solidarity, the commons and mechanisms of direct democracy, and explore opportunities for autonomy. (exits stage left)

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fig. 8 The mosaic panels of Émiel van Averbeke and Jan van Asperen’s Maison du Peuple.

Owen Hatherley, "Socialist class: the Houses of the People," The Architectural Review 244, no. 1454 (2018): 37. Plan C, “Radical municipalism: demanding the future,” https://www.weareplanc.org/blog/radical-municipalism-demanding-the-future/

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act III_dynamic

THE RADICAL RACCOMMODEUSE (enters stage left) And to go down a scale within our confederation, each Repairground and its Wardrobe exist in a symbiosis of experimentation and communication. Tonight you find yourself here at Electronics, in two buildings from the early 20th century, this, a collective workers’ house, designed by Bourse du Travail architect Roger Poyé, and our Repairground, once a lace atelier and factory. (she points to the back of the room, where the tall shutters are swung open) To get here you travelled through our strange neighbourhood consisting of the husks of modern-era lace production before its demise in the last decade, the pokerfaced utilitarian apartments, schools, dealerships, and the wide wasteland along Rues des Quatre Coins where factories, shops and houses were demolished to dispel displaced people who sheltered there. This old communal house was known as La Chapelle in the neighbourhood, probably after the arched entrance you saw on the way in, and because it was known as a lively place to gather. In the old factory, Calaisiens learnt a body language of lace, a set of movements and interactions in concert with the materials of lace-making, from the heavy iron of the looms, to the fragility of silk threads, to the resistance of Jacquard punch-cards. Some things do change quite profoundly, and demand that we learn new ways of mending. When Calais was building itself on the bounty of lace, Ada Lovelace was using her poetical science to write the first computer algorithm. We may say most aptly that the Analytical Engine weaves algebraic patterns just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves, in her own words.32 We hold the product of her lineage in our hands, in our pockets, or on our desk at home. Computers and their programming have come to shape modern life, tools of great control as well as empowerment. At this Repairground we deal with all electronics, however intelligent, in the interest of maintaining the resources of the community rather than consuming new, as well as reducing waste. It was felt that we should open up discourse from the Repairgrounds to broader geo-solidarities, addressing injustices within the tech global supply chain including communities affected by dangerous mining and waste processing. Ewaste is the fastest growing waste stream, with underdeveloped recycling infrastructures and controversial export patterns.33 Our approach includes research, advocacy and direct action, alongside learning the practical skills of mending broken devices. You’ll have heard of the Right to Repair movement, which addresses the corporate enclosure of the afterlife of electronic products, which is defended by outlawing disassembly, repair and modding in order to protect the ‘intellectual property’ of the manufacturer and maintain their lucrative repair market.34 These obstacles to repair enable manufacturers to design for obsolescence, devices that are built to break or made incompatible with future hardware and software, forcing consumers to constantly upgrade. In alliance with Right to Repair, we’re making 32 Yasmin Kafai and Jane Margolis, "Celebrating Ada Lovelace,” MIT Press blog, last modified 11th October 2016, https://mitpress.mit.edu/blog/celebrating-ada-lovelace 33 Nathan Proctor, “Corporations Are Co-Opting Right-to-Repair,” Wired, accessed 17 May 2020. https://www.wired.com/story/right-to-repair-coopt/ 34 The Repair Association, “The Association,” accessed 1st June 2020, https://repair.org/association



progress increasing the accessibility of parts, tools, schematics and software, demanding a sensitive design approach to afterlife, as well as pushing the legalisation of tinkering and re-selling. In our community, we don’t share a set of in-common beliefs, no such hegemonic common sense exists, yet we style ourselves around the common, free access and engagement with resources. The expansive cooperative social networks in which wealth is created now should reward the entire network, but should belong to nobody, property should become nonproperty and wealth must become common.35 In our Repairground, we push back against both enclosures against physical fixing, as well as the hierarchical control of the internet; once seen as the information commons, a revolutionary democratic tool, the web is revealed as a zero institution easily hijacked by communicative capitalism36 as well as regime censorship and surveillance. So in Electronics, our repair praxis extends to web education and action, including aspects of hacktivism that concern bypassing censorship, supporting free software and open content. Where material mending meets its immaterial counterpart, we demanded a physical arena. The irl foundations of a forum. A stage, even. (hesitates a moment then exits, untying her apron)



communicating to the confederation

THE CABARETIER (enters) A stage! Or a table. Or a pin-up board. (taps her foot on the wood below) There is a difference between administering a space of appearance, being allocated one, and creating it. And the difference is theatricality: your performance here produces what here means and looks like; 37 and the theatrical becomes a representation of participation. It seemed the desire to participate in community was waning in the last 50 years, that youth became eager to fix a self-image in advance of experience, protecting themselves from the disorder and dislocation of encountering differences in the world.38 The community solidarity was once so strong between workers seemed to morph into a mythic solidarity of will rather than action.39 When workers could become consumers, withdrawal became possible and prevalent: self-contained homes, intense family lives and a simplified, bureaucratised engagement with the external city.40 The character of the urban mosaic, in which parts were open to myriad persons and purposes, and in which the little guys could cajole or feel the closeness of help, 41 gave way to more enclosed, generic and corporate sites of socialisation.

fig. 3 THE ARCHITECT

In our town, this motion intensified in recent decades, particularly due to the dynamic of migration. On the side of the displaced, their violent mistreatment by the police, the antipathy of many locals and the need to avoid relocation or fingerprinting meant an imperative to stay hidden. On the side of Calaisiens, the securitisation of their city, the diversion of their narrative, the appropriation of their heritage buildings to squatters, developers or demolition crawlers all led to a bunker mentality legible through the town’s distinct spatial segregation and the depletion of

35 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “How to Open Property to the Common,” In Assembly, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 94. 36 Simon Springer, “Public Space as Emancipation: Meditations on Anarchism, Radical Democracy, Neoliberalism and Violence,” Antipode 43, no. 2 (2011): 538. 37 Ibid, 537. 38 Richard Sennett, The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life (New York: Knopf, 1970), 13-18. 39 Ibid, 39. 40 Ibid, 28. 41 Ibid, 70.



diverse urban life. The stage vacated, the conversation stagnated. And above all of this, was the purposeful hand of the state outlining this hostile environment. In this respect, the conduct of cabaret was an invitation, a nudge for Calaisiens to participate in the disorder of life again, to share their experience with those who are different. In our Repairgrounds, we cut open facades, projected stages and platforms outwards, forcing cabaret to spill onto the street, hoping to disturb bordertown isolationism and the monolithic mundanity of neoliberal public space.42 This cabaretesque spatial anarchy is a kind of honesty, a refusal of ignorance, but not without its own pains. The pain of navigating situations that are out of your control may result in momentary bitterness, but develops self-criticality, and possibly humility.43 To subject yourself repeatedly to these situations is to foster a curiosity, a caring-about for the others that you can’t control.44 This is the dynamic of the Repairgrounds, to share experience and knowledge and space, to deal with each other rather than privately intensify grievances. In doing so, the particularities of our otherness are appreciated as a constellation rather than in opposition.45 Accepting this constellation of conflicts within our democracy means celebrating the parallel presence of consensus and dissensus. Democracy, as we experience it, can be a protean process which resists the archic logics of sovereignty and capitalism.46 This kind of democracy defuses possible hostilities by transforming antagonism into agonism, in which confrontation ceases to be a competition between elites or enemies, but rather a dialogue between equal adversaries.47 Our democracy manifests as a community happening, as we share our stages, a contestation of and in public space. Our issues and concerns change over time. The idea of the repair confederation is processual, it moves between convening around a broken hard disk, to addressing issues in the repair confederation, for the city and its terrestrials, out towards exercising transnational solidarities through a relational understanding of space, and the subject of our repair. As we learn to repair, our city generates a level of cultural and economic autonomy from the state, enabling us to question its prescribed roles and make our own demands on issues in which we are protagonists, including the oppressive border regime. (exits) THE RADICAL RACCOMMODEUSE (enters) Throughout these rooms you’ll find hoists, screens, curtains, interactive elements for probing the environment, for mediating degrees of exposure to the community. These intermissions between seen and unseen, vast and miniature, emulate the way lace-making precision work could liberate the creative interior of the individual through its peculiar temporality. In this enacting of interiority and exteriority, the donning of different roles, we understand the community as an unscripted production, of innumerable nested narratives where notes and cues are inscribed in space. The community is like the ship of Theseus, it’s a sock

42 43 44 45 46 47

Springer, “Public Space as Emancipation,” 544 Sennett, The Uses of Disorder, 91. Ibid, 97. Ibid, 149. Springer, “Public Space as Emancipation,” 531 Ibid, 530.



Proctor, Nathan. “Corporations Are Co-Opting Right-to-Repair.” Wired. Accessed 17 May 2020. https://www.wired.com/story/right-to-repair-co-opt/. Rosselin, Céline. "The ins and outs of the hall: A Parisian example." In At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space, edited by Irene Cieraad, 53-59. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Segel, Harold B. "Fin de siècle Cabaret." Performing Arts Journal 2, no. 1 (1977): 41-57. Sennett, Richard. The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life. New York: Knopf, 1970. Springer, Simon. “Public Space as Emancipation: Meditations on Anarchism, Radical Democracy, Neoliberalism and Violence.” Antipode 43, no. 2 (2011): 525–62. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8330.2010.00827.x.

Image credits fig. 1 _THE RADICAL RACCOMMODEUSE, author collage fig. 2 _THE CABARETIER, author collage fig. 3 _THE ARCHITECT, author collage fig. 4 _text site: stage in the Wardrobe building, author drawing fig. 5 _Cedric Price, Fun Palace, London, 1960-64. Interior perspective in Aureli, Pier Vittorio. “Labor and Architecture: Revisiting Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt”. Log, no. 23 (2011): 97–118. fig. 6 _ Building section, Maison du Peuple, Brussels, designed by Victor Horta. Hidden Architecture, accessed 2nd June 2020 http://hiddenarchitecture.net/maison-du-peuple-house-of-people/ fig. 7 _The grand dining room at the Maison du Peuple, Brussels, designed by Victor Horta in Hatherley, Owen. "Socialist class: the Houses of the People" The Architectural Review 244, no. 1454 (2018): 36-39. fig. 8 _ The mosaic panels of Émiel van Averbeke and Jan van Asperen’s Maison du Peuple, in Hatherley, Owen. "Socialist class: the Houses of the People" The Architectural Review 244, no. 1454 (2018): 36-39.

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darned over and over until none of its original yarn remains. It’s a resistance to immanence.48 The community is not a work to be done, but an infinite task. And now for the main event. (she hangs up her microphone and steps down from the stage, undocking her card. Behind her the curtains begin to rustle, the sound of wheels rolling in the east wing. The spotlight blinks, dips, steadies itself)

Bibliography Appignanesi, Lisa. The cabaret. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 2004. Aureli, Pier Vittorio. “Labor and Architecture: Revisiting Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt”. Log, no. 23 (2011): 97–118. Castronovo, Russ. Beautiful Democracy: Aesthetics and Anarchy in a Global Era. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Easterling, Keller. "Disposition." In Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics. Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information edited by Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich, 250-265. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010. Frichot, Hélène. "Stealing into Gilles Deleuze’s baroque house." In Deleuze and space, edited by Ian Buchanan and Gregg Lambert, 61-79. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Frichot, Hélène, and Sara Vall. "Urban Biopower Stockholm and the Biopolitics of Creative Resistance." Field: a Free Journal for Architecture 6, no. 1 (2015): 39-53. Gordon, Rae Beth. "From Charcot to Charlot: Unconscious imitation and spectatorship in French cabaret and early cinema." Critical Inquiry 27, no. 3 (2001): 515-549. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. “How to Open Property to the Common.” In Assembly, 85-106. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Hatherley, Owen. "Socialist class: the Houses of the People" The Architectural Review 244, no. 1454 (2018): 36-39. Kafai, Yasmin, and Jane Margolis. "Celebrating Ada Lovelace.” MIT Press blog. Last modified 11th October 2016, https://mitpress.mit.edu/blog/celebrating-ada-lovelace Nancy, Jean-Luc, and Peter Connor. The Inoperative Community. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. Neidich, Warren. "From Noopower to Neuropower: How Mind Becomes Matter." In Cognitive Architecture: From Biopolitics to Noopolitics. Architecture & Mind in the Age of Communication and Information, edited by Deborah Hauptmann and Warren Neidich, 539-581. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010. Plan C, “Radical municipalism: demanding the future.” Last modified 11th June 2017 https://www.weareplanc.org/blog/radicalmunicipalism-demanding-the-future/

Nancy, The Inoperative Community, 55.

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

the studio under the stage

and beyond

• S2 | Y 5

The Radical Raccommodeuse

This project reimagines Calais as a confederation of ‘Repairgrounds,’ buildings that potentialize social change, and possible system change. This new community is styled after the Raccommodeuses, the repair-women of the city’s once prosperous lace industry. Repair is an imperative to act, together, to rebuild empathy and solidarity, and empower the people in the politics of their city in crisis.

Addressing the urban environment, we move from a historic understanding of the city as a machine park, built to house the huge, noisy lace looms, to the city as network for repair. For this new community, the old lace architectures are re-inhabited, re-imagined, repaired. Making pairs, an old factory becomes a ‘Repair-ground’ consisting of workshops and classrooms for investigation and speculation, while an empty house is reimagined under the name the ‘Wardrobe’ as a venue for review and outwards communication.

• S2 | Y5

The Radical Raccommodeuse

The historic cabarets were vessels for fierce social and political satire, serving an underbelly who delighted to critique, as well as participate in the critique of others; dissensus was expressed through dialogue betw drapes, shutters, arches, platforms and stages creates a stylistic anarchy of moving parts that encourages t

d in provocation and parody. To enter the cabaret was to subject oneself ween audience and performer. Seeking to emulate this, a landscape of the risky caring-about for others that the individual can’t control.

• S2 | Y 5

The Radical Raccommodeuse

Both of these buildings are made theatrical. The theatricality of discourse aims to encourage all kinds of voices, with these sites enabling face-to-face discussion as well as facilitating direct decision-making. In the role of the architect, my primary method to cultivate cabaretesque conduct is through a spatial disposition, an architecture whose active forms invite a repertoire of interaction. The tectonic approach is like lace, regarding the existing fabric of the building like the

structural mesh of tulle into which the motif is woven. The design becomes a patchwork of these maximalist moments that intercept the existing, sometimes cutting it away, sometimes patching it up, or acting as a crutch. This process of reviewing, dismantling, reorganising or enriching space is itself a task of repair. Ornament is liberated, interrupting permanence by letting it unroll, move or fold away, exposing it to wear or breakage and inciting attentiveness and guardianship.

• S2 | Y5

The Radical Raccommodeuse

From five sites, the project focuses on one factory-house pair from the lace era. These delapidated building resist, speculate. The Wardrobe, where outwards communication happens, houses a printworks at the front,

gs are subject to ongoing creative repairs that equip them with the facilities that the community requires in learning to mend, re-make, reimagine, and to organise, , stage, backstage architect’s studio, exhibition, library and archive spaces.

• S2 | Y 5

The Radical Raccommodeuse

It’s imagined that monthly reviews take place in the Repairground for those at Electronics, and quarterly performances. The Repairground consists of intersecting components across parallel internal streets. The cen

showcases in the Wardrobe for any participants of the repair confederation, and regular assemblies and referendums to progress issues raised during these ntral decks are a focused zone, where the precision repair-work is undertaken and demonstrated, around which are more free workshop and backstage spaces.

• S

S1 | Y4

20 | 21 S1 | Y 5 S2 | Y 5 S1 | Y 4 S2 | Y 4 S1 | Y 3 S2 | Y 3 Y1 & Y2

• S1 | Y4

The Marriage and the Masquerade

Fieldwork was undertaken in the Danish South Funen Archipelago over two weeks, sailing with a small cargo ship and a schooner and their crew to research and connect with these small island communities.

My research dealt with the thousands of visiting couples who tie the knot each year on the island of Ærø. Branded as Denmark’s own Las Vegas, its picturesque setting beautifies the bureaucratic appeal of fast and minimal processing and a brief 24-hour residency requirement, a framework developed by Ærø municipality, and enabled by the decentralised marriage application system in Denmark. Through an inventory of devices, either collected on-site or summoned to probe it, an analytic methodology emerges, populated by mirrors, masks, scenes and puppets. Ærø’s ‘fairytale town’ of Ærøskøbing is discovered to be a heritage scenography, against which wedding ceremonies are staged, and whose significance has shifted from site of civic pride to commercial product.

Ærø w

wedding couple, www.danishislandweddings.com

Ærøskøbing Buildings 1:

Masking tradition, aeroe.maskefestival.dk

The Marriage and the Masquerade

Street mirrors: parasitically fixed to windows, with residents of old town Ærøskøbing behind them, observing the neighbourhood from their living rooms. Scenography: a masking of Ærøskøbing’s 1700s townscape by painterly preservation; a product development; a process of staging authenticity and obscuring the town’s contemporary enterprise.

photo studio: backdrop

Masks: donned by the Ærøbo during the Holy Three Kings festival, where they are invited into neighbouring homes to drink cherry wine and socialise on anonymous terms [or] a device for distancing, a selfpreserving response of locals to tourism.

stage / storyboard

fly system / hose tower

• S1 | Y 4

audience trap room stage

backstage front doors

Puppet: the movement of couples through a prechoreographed environment, prioritised over the free expression of residents in their public space.

prosceni um

probe: fire station to [nuptial] photo-lab Building iso 1:100

probe: provincial icons sustain a rustic sensibility of married eternity

/ assembl y

- Michel Foucault

Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias, 1984.

The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.

grid

fly tower

scene dock

aud

itor

ium

stage

trap room

upstage

stage right

stage left

off left (wings)

off right (wings)

dark room

pit

downstage

apron

Livets gang i Lidenlund by Henning Gantriis in Politiken, 1950-80s.

• S1 | Y4

The Marriage and the Masquerade

This project makes visible the bureaucratic apparatus of the island’s wedding tourism. Ærøskøbing is represented mechanically, opening up the town in theatrical autonomous workings of the community can communicate with the stage of the visitors, and the mechanisms of the wedding and hospitality industry above. The stree comment on causality, with Ærø Town hall as a carousel, the main driving gear, processing up to 25 couples per day.

The townscape is treated as a series of checkpoints. Ærø has the authority to process applications and set a residency period; a residency checklist could also b couples’ ‘citizenship’ through evidential investment in place, the industry becomes immersive and visitors become complicit in their staging.

Long table fieldwork sharing in the hold of our expedition ship, SAMKA

Chatting local and global politics with folks from Langeland

Scouring the local archives on the small island of Lyø

l layers: a stage (streets), fly system (tourist infrastructure) and trap room (resident community) below. The street constitutes a void between which the backstage, et is intermediate, where the exchange of forces between top and bottom layers actualises, forcing a degree of transparency onto the tourist arena. The mechanics

be implemented. The town would embody an extreme artificiality, a form of staging the environment in which there is no suspension of disbelief. Through proving

• S2 | Y4

20 | 21 S1 | Y 5 S2 | Y 5 S1 | Y 4 S2 | Y 4 S1 | Y 3 S2 | Y 3 Y1 & Y2

• S2 | Y 4

Life in Equilibrium: land allocation competition

During my time at Asante, I worked on a proposal for a land allocation competition in Eskilstuna municipality for 16 solar-powered rowhouses. The competition soug was produced in collaboration with a local solar consultant and low-energy construction company.

The design featured a farm-style plan, with four residences to each block, creating narrow homes each with a unique form. The plans were motivated by adaptability, ea mobility-friendly bedrooms.The forms responded directly to solar movements, the roofs becoming sundials. Having won the allocation, Asante now goes forward sourcing i byggemenskap (building community).

ght architectural merit, design-integrated solar technology, and high power yield, which was measured using the local university’s solar calculator. Life in Equilibrium

asy to re-partition for changing needs, following the natural cycle of human inhabitation over differnet life stages. Home offices could become dining rooms, nurseries, or investors towards the land purchase and building permit. The practice has ambitions to engage the community stakeholders, possibly via bostadsrätter (housing co-op) or

orangery use: nursery

orangery use: study

• S2 | Y 4

Life in Equilibrium: land allocation competition

solar street facades

The design process was focused on aesthetic and yield-optimal roof forms. During the process there was contention over the electricity balancing, with each roof yielding differently, thus raising maintenance and ownership issues. The direction of energy legislation was discussed following the possibility of a Community Energy model in which this self-sufficient development could trade internally, via a peer to peer connection. Parallel to the project, I wrote a paper proposing an 18th Sustainable Development Goal, implicate and empower. People are currently implicated through top down liability rhetoric, inciting guilt via statistics on consumption and waste. Implicate and empower should be parallel dynamics; with the sustainable responsibility of the individual resourced by a receptive institution, beginning with wider opportunities for informal democratic participation, and partnerships between levels of society and industry. The architect

low-carbon design elements

is proposed as community guardian of a decentralised energy model, defined by electricity generation connected at a local distributional level, Community Energy, which has potential for reinstating social and civic values. Affordable, user-friendly technology has seen the rise of prosumers who are interested in models like P2P trading, but lack resources, knowledge and time. The architect has a strong hand against these communicative and collaboration challenges, familiar with dialogues between developers, suppliers and local authorities. On the grassroots side, initiatives could benefit from a business attitude to RE tenders and land bids, or even from the business status of an architect practice in obtaining higher rate subsidies. Overall the architect’s potential to support CE goes beyond the role of designers of eco-buildings, instead embedding themselves in a social infrastructure of empowerment that, in this instance, is organised by energy agency.

solar integration

• S1 | Y3

20 | 21 S1 | Y 5 S2 | Y 5 S1 | Y 4 S2 | Y 4 S1 | Y 3 S2 | Y 3 Y1 & Y2

A three-year undergraduate degree comprised of six design studio semesters with unique sites, concerns and tutorship. The contextualisation of architectural design and discourse within cultural and political theory is inspirited through various parallel courses in artistic practice, architectural history, technology, theory and academic thinking.

• S1 | Y 3

Museums in Mews

model and development

with S. Gomes

• S1 | Y 3

Museums in Mews

Part I of Museums in Mews was a group project (with J. Forde, A. Olanrewaju, S. Gomes). My third year at Edinburgh School of Architecture constituted two local design projects. Both projects used tectonic dynamics and aesthetic allusion to recontextualise a legacy of production, as craft, through the performance of the object. The first project, Cutting through the Domestic, studies the informality of the home through curating objects chosen from the National Museum of Scotland. This collection’s domestic qualities of functionality, human scale and their craftedness, were mapped from formal display cabinets to abstraction into new city-scale containers. Each curational transmutation was represented inside a Kirkcaldy period room from the museum, maintaining structural and organisational domestic indicators.

group drawing: The Kirkcaldy room

:100

group drawing: domestic de-contextualised then re-connected in the studio

• S1 | Y3

Museums in Mews

Based on the concept of supper as a meeting of each object, an installation-drawing was produced in which earlier configurations (of the city as trade district, and and in a mobile state of clutter. In the process, the curation becomes a homogenous design to be superimposed onto the site.

10a on the table

plot as tablecloth

S. Gomes

CONTEXTS for a COLLECTION

exhibits projected

drawing movement

folding tablecloth

10a mews

S. Gomes, supper super

10a under fa

d the collection as a journey through the home) are overlaid. Through performing the supper ritual over this drawing, domesticity manifested as created, cultivated

rimposed

ault lines

group drawing, composed by I. Colley and S. Gomes

a collection of the domestic

TA B L E R I T U A L S

• S1 | Y 3

Museums in Mews

with S. Gomes: folding ritual

with S. Gomes

The site is a contemporary mews building by Richard Murphy architects. Here, the authorship of the museum’s curation is reconsidered, opting for found domestic folding ritual at the end of the supper, the same flux of the lived domestic is introduced along specific fault lines. Key tools are cutting and crutch. Floors and walls the interrupted cellular format of the house and held together by an armature that suggests the interdependence of household rituals, a complexity behind the sa

C U R TA I N [ U N ] F O L D S

c objects within this found architecture. The modern domestic re-interprets the exhibit: the profane becomes sacred in its contextual necessity. Taking cue from the s are removed before returning integrity to the building through individual structures derived from the folding drawings. The new collection is hung out to dry over acred chaos of home.

HOUSE:CRU TCHED

• S2 | Y3

20 | 21 S1 | Y 5 S2 | Y 5 S1 | Y 4 S2 | Y 4 S1 | Y 3 S2 | Y 3 Y1 & Y2

In my final Bachelor’s project, Retuning the Warp at Prestongrange, the tectonics of a post-industr remains are explored through their ghostly imprint before being refuelled; the large circular footp

storic

and c

urren t]

Collier Laddie: scots mining tune

Re-Tuning the Warp at Prestongrange

intaglio: winding engine motion

intaglio: mine cage

arged disch treat ed w aste

kiln footprints at Prestongrange

mould

to for esho

re [h i

stamp

hydraulic brick press

• S2 | Y 3

Levenhall spoil lagoons

cke

rial colliery are encountered in a dormant phase: lacking motion, sound, purpose and human instruction. Toward re-engaging these mannerisms onsite, its ruinous prints of brick kilns become pools that plug into a historic network of waste pipes.

osed sa usin ltwate r g ro ute collect i of o ld h on from arbo ur foresho re

er pow

tio

sta

colliery Cornish beam engine w at er re m ov al ro ut e

i rat

filt

ial

art

an rd mo

ing ye

pip

g tin

is ex

ord

in ye

rom

f rge

tio

ina

sal

ha isc

r is

ati iltr

te wa sea

t in

sal

we po

tio

ta rs

n eli

ip hp

e nzi cke

o ]C

use

dis

s[ ard tow

ef dy

zie en

prop

Prestongrange at peak industry

• S2 | Y 3

Re-Tuning the Warp at Prestongrange

I adopted a focused machine mannerism in textile production, re-engaging the threads of the indu Seeking to elevate the site from its contamination, I developed a centre for responsible manufactur is memorialised in a network of sunken yarn-dyeing cones and the tapestry display towers that cul

left: warp-w

right: pro

clean soak

drain

prepare dye vat

4. wind up hank 9. wind down hank r

8. add dye [turmeric]

7. add boiling water

W E AV I N G | D Y E I N G | D R Y I N G

5. squeeze excess 6. drain clean water

ustrial revolution. The mechanics of looms, spinning and dyeing translate the colliery’s winding and signalling into an artisanal language of pattern movement. re, while referencing historic and recent stitching traditions at Prestongrange. The intense upwards and downward motions of the former mine shaft and chimneys lminate the production series and the continuous textiles from three vertical looms.

weighted loom front, hand movements paths follow the batten, shuttle, heddle, bobbin, shed.

ofile mannerisms, the heddle bar is brought backwards and forwards to allow weft passage between one set of warp, then the other

dye and stir

12. wind up hank

10. stir vat often

11. replace handle

CRAF T MANNERISM

• S2 | Y 3

Re-Tuning the Warp at Prestongrange

Interconnected routes present my intervention as a machine, tooled by people and manual device kiln grid, over the festival plaza, to the studio that sits into the hillside. After reclaiming and re-inve

tapestry studio

display towers

spinning

festival plaza

drying

ein dy

ay lkw a ic w

saline uptake for dyeing, ground source heating, marine outfall partially filtered

circulation

es for dyeing, drying yarns, spinning, transporting, indexing and weaving, while a public walkway, winds between each process from the dyehouse on the circular estigating the earth, vertical loop ground source heating is proposed for the high heat consumption in dyeing and drying.

sunlight: slatted on eastern face curved forms shelter tapestries from direct light

studio & tapestry towers

UV filter glazing

tapestry exposure: max. 50 lux

yarn routes

production | exhibition

• S2 | Y3

Re-Tuning the Warp at Prestongrange

The buildings are temperature and humidity stabilised through their tall, earth sheltered forms, performances and seminars. As the upper levels integrate air flow into production the sunken layer

mugginess lowered heat dissipates up 12m volume extraction at 5m before dew point

ear

tem

rat

ure

10-

°C

| D RY

with built in mechanisms for cross ventilation and wind scoops. In summer, yarn drying is lifted outdoors, while the acoustically variegated drying rooms host r employs water in dyeing and filtration.

weaving & walkway

tapestry hoist

ina

spinning & storing [N

ell

yin

dyeing colour zones

drying rooms

• S2 | Y3

Re-Tuning the Warp at Prestongrange

The design responds to damaging practices of dumping spoil locally, developing a new network thus ensuring marine outfall is safe for local wildlife. The dyehouse retains the brick of the colliery the gurgle of pipes, the clink of the loom.

yarn stored at 18 °C, <50% humidit

son

tog

ram

tin

YA R N L I B R A R Y

rov

ing

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inn

ing

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k of pipelines to use the pre-mordanted seawater for dyeing and a central filtration plant and drains to process plant dyewater and iron-contaminated runoff, y and kilns, creating acoustically similar spaces and these continue to involve staff and visitors in the site’s industrial history through the hum of the spinning wheel,

gridded

pressed

he he

els

ath

ere

arn

braced

sonic

S P I N N I N G S TAT I O N

• S2 | Y 3

Re-Tuning the Warp at Prestongrange Autumn 2018

Issue 35

the journal of the royal incorporation of architects in scotland

New President Robin Webster OBE PRIAS RIAS Strategy Newsletter

9 772044 185005

ISSN 2044-1851 £12.50

Scottish Student Awards for Architecture

Retuning the Warp at Prestongrange also addresses the highly deprived areas near the former colliery, hoping to engage the local community in its ar

BUILT MANNERISM

dyeing

drying

drying spinning

rtisanal enterprise while the archiving of local songs and stories inform collaborative tapestries and build positive personal histories of Prestongrange.

P E R F O R M AT I V E O B J E C T

20 | 21 S1 | Y 5 S2 | Y 5 S1 | Y 4 S2 | Y 4 S1 | Y 3 S2 | Y 3 Y1 & Y2

• Y2 & Y1

• S 2 | Y 2 a library: a puzzle place

The puzzle library is a place of making and solving. In this duality, and its overlap, it becomes a place of exchange. Routes are sensitive to the spatial psychologies of these two roles, giving direction and orientation as ‘clues’ to solvers while letting makers stumble upon or forge their own way. The library is a thing of movement: puzzles moving and people. Main routes and secret passages create an environment of gameplay in which users have the autonomy to change their role or route within the flexibility of internal structures. And, between these complexities, rules of play are expressed through the building’s own pattern language and its continuation of the site conditions around it. Taking cue from Rome’s scars - its endless happen-upon pits full of relics and ruins - the puzzle place poses as a library of questions and solutions to be rediscovered.

reliquary

circles of the unsolved

workshop: mend and make

the exchange

• S1 | Y 2

AMPHI-ARCH

This project had an introspective brief, first demanding interrogation of the practices and spaces that comprised our own architecture school. Our collaborative ethos manifested in adaptable spaces with visual interaction that would relax the pinup concept through continuous display of progress work.

The process of designing an architecture school began individually with rapid models for form-finding within the context of a disused industrial courtyard. Using my casting skills, I developed a series of interconnected program sketches which related to existing desire lines on-site, as well as imagining new pedagogical wayfinding. Spatially, these paths reworked the theme of steps in the steep old town by creating an amphitheatre form.

• S1 | Y2

ARCHITOUCH

During this, our first collaborative project (with S. Draskovik, J. Brookfield, S. Gomes, R. Zhang), we adopted a design ‘democracy’ that led to intense programmatic discussion and contributed to our understanding of the multiplicity of approaches that could naturally inhabit our school. I advocated live drawing and modelling as discussion medium, and after experimenting with form through quick physical modelling with our Edinburgh site, we pursued a gridded and “scooped” plan that created indoor and outdoor studio and display zones and encouraged motion between boundaries.

In our models, a maze-like spatial structure is organised by a concrete spine, reflecting the interruption of ritual tasks with spontaneous breakout and experiment zones. We were interested

in maintaining site circulation routes while forging new ones to allow interaction between the various actors, and enable cross-pollination. A concept of tunnel and void motivated gathering between the two open-plan zones (exhibition East wing, study West wing).

CONNECTIONS

PRIMARY TO SECONDARY BEAM CONNECTION

• S2 | Y2

Castle timber pavilion

ADDING TO THE TRADITIONAL NOTCHED BEAM CONNECTION, WE USED A COWLEY CONNECTOR TO PROVIDE TENSION OVER THE JOINT, INCREASE RIGIDITY AND PROTECTING AGAINST THE IMPACTS OF SHRINKAGE AROUND THE NOTCH. THIS CONNECTION PROVIDES CLADDING TO BEAM CONNECTION A FLAT, UNINTERRUPTED PLANE FOR DECKING TO BE LAID AND FROM BELOW AT PEAKNO WALKWAY HEIGHT THERE ARE ABSOLUTELY WITH HIGH POINTS OF METAL FIXINGS VISIBLE. CLADDING, STANDARD SAWN LENGTHS OF LARCH ARE INSUFFICIENT (HIGH MAXIMUM 5m). TWO SLATS WILL BE NEEDED AND WILL MEET AT WALKWAY LEVEL AND CONNECT BY MEANS OF A WELDED GALVANISED W PLATE (EXPLODED HERE FOR EASE OF VIEW). TO RESIST IMPOSED FORCES (I.E PEOPLE LEANING, WIND) IT MAY BE NECESSARY TO INSTALL STEEL CONNECTORS BETWEEN ILA COLLEY CLADDING SLATS HIGHER UP ALSO.

CONNECTIONS

Design of a lightweight timber structure. The brief consisted of a viewing walkway and pavilion, outlining the full medieval form of Dirleton castle. This group project (with G. Jiang, J. Brookfield and G. Klefti) demanded a holistic undertsanding of a timber frame structure and communication of a final design through detailed connections, axonometric drawings and a series of calculations to confirm the stability of the walkway and pavilion. A key consideration was maintaining the cadence of the ruins, so users experience the uneven way that time has influenced the masonry. First experimenting with mimicking medieval methods of construction, such as bracing and mortise and tenon joints, we decided that the best way of showcasing the ruins would be to contrast them with a lighter structure, discarding haunches in favour of thin and numerous columns with flush primary and secondary beams. The pavilion contained a sculpture gallery encircled by a stair descending from an opaque enclosure to the glazed ground level. I worked primarily with wall and cladding junctions, considering air, water, insect infiltration, and durability.

JULIA BROOKFIELD

AFTER CONSIDERING A LESS VISIBLE T PLATE CONNECTION, WE BECAME AWARE THAT INSERTING A STEEL PLATE WOULD JEOPARDISE THE STRENGTH OF THE TIMBER, ESPECIALLY WITH SUCH THIN SLATS. THEREFORE, WE OPTED FOR A PLATE THAT ENCASED THE SLAT AND WOULD HAVE INCREASED RESISTANCE TO WIND LOAD. THOUGH VISIBLE, THE FREQUENCY AND DEPTH OF SLATS WOULD MOSTLY HIDE ANY METAL. CLADDING FOUNDATION CONNECTION

CONNECTIONS ILA COLLEY

JULIA

HERE THE THREADED STEEL RODS PENETRATE BOTH CONCRETE FOUNDATION (FULL 150mm) AND STONE BELOW (50MM), FIXED WITH EPOXY RESIN, WHILE ARE ALSO DRILLED INTO THE SLAT ABOVE 300mm TO PROVIDE EXTRA VERTICAL RIGIDITY TO THESE SLENDER TIMBER ELEMENTS. THE ROD IS BOLTED AT THE MORTISE (WITH PLATE WASHER) AND THIS VOID CAN BE CLOSED WITH TIMBER PLUG. OVERALL THE CONNECTION SEEKS TO RESIST LATERAL AND UPLIFT LOADS WHICH WOULD USUALLY BE RESISTED BY LARGER TIMBER MEMBERS.

CONNECTIONS

COLUMN FOUNDATION CONNECTION ILA COLLEY

LOOKING TO AN INNOVATIVE HIDDEN JOINT PRECEDENT, THIS CONNECTION USES ROUTED HEXAGONAL POCKETS FOR THE BOLT HEADS INTO END OF BEAM, MEANING THE COLUMN SITS SEAMLESSLY ON THESE AND THE BOLTS AND STEEL PLATE ARE NOT VISIBLE. A CONCRETE PAD OF MINIMUM DEPTH 150 mm IS CAST EXACTLY TO SHAPE OF RUIN BELOW (WHERE WALKWAY IS OVER RUINS). THE M12 THREADED BOLTS ARE LONG ENOUGH TO PENETRATE THROUGH BOTH CONCRETE PAD AND INTO STONE BELOW FOR STRONGER CONNECTION. THE BOLT SPACING ON PERIMETER IS DEFINED BY A 5 X DIAMETER DISTANCE FROM BOLT TO EDGE, THUS MINIMISING THE VISIBLE CONCRETE EDGE WITHOUT COMPROMISING THE INTEGRITY OF THE CONCRETE PAD.

JULIA BROOKFIELD

A BROOKFIELD

PRIMARY BEAM TO SECONDARY BEAM CONNECTION (COWLEY CONNECTOR) 195mm x 100mm OAK PRIMARY BEAM 35mm x 60mm (x 100mm) NOTCH PLATE IMPRINT (ROUTED OR LASER RASTER ENGRAVED) 10mm DIAMETER, 200mm LENGTH THREADED STEEL BOLT (37.5 mm INTO BEAM) 2.5mm THICK GALVANISED STEEL U PLATE SLIT INTO 195mm x 100mm SECONDARY BEAM / JOIST FOR TIGHTENING INTERNAL BOLT HEAD.

195mm x 100mm OAK PRIMARY BEAM 60mm x 120mm LARCH SLAT

GEORGIA KLEFTI 3.5mm PLATE IMPRINT

GINA JIANG

(ROUTED OR LASER RASTER) 3.5mm GALVANISED STEEL U PLATE

8mm DIAMETER, 40mm LENGTH STEEL SCREWS 13.5mm NOTCH INTO CLADDING SLAT 6mm DIAMETER, 70mm LENGTH ZINC PLATED CROSS DOWEL BOLTS

GEORGIA KLEFTI

GINA JIANG

60MM X 120MM LARCH SLAT

37.5MM X 37.5MM X 30MM MORTISE 15MM DIAMETER, 500MM LENGTH THREADED STEEL RODS 3MM THICK GALVANISED STEEL PLATE 150MM MINIMUM DEPTH OF CONTINUOUS CONCRETE STRIP

G. Jiang

GEORGIA KLEFTI

195mm x 195mm OAK COLUMN 12mm DIAMETER, 200mm LONG THREADED STEEL BOLTS 15mm THICK GALVANISED STEEL T PLATE, RISING 150 mm INTO COLUMN 14mm DIAMETER STEEL DOWELS FLUSH AT 195mm LENGTH

GINA JIANG

• s u mmer | Y2

Extra-curricular

Half-way through my Bachelor’s studies, I decided to design and make my own desk, a four-legged briefcase for scribbling on. This workstation catered to producing, reading, digesting, remembering; it was to hold threads of thoughts, rolls of unresolved wonderings, formal files and all manner of nifty mark-making instruments. It had to fit into my tiny room and be easily dismantled and reassembled with basic tools for easy removals.

Restricting myself to a signle sheet of 12mm birch plywood to save on cost, space and weight, I experimented with various interlocking, hinged and fastened designs. Quickly downsizing drafts of overextended tenons for hoisting memory lines and dry-jointed CNC puzzle pieces, the final design was put together with basic power tools and under high time pressure, and with a little help from workshop owner Paul Speight was fabricated within one week. The final desk consisted of a box-style top with drawers and T legs fixed with wingnuts.

• Y2 - Y3

Model-making and exhibition curation has been one of my strengths throu alongside a final design proposal. I’ve worked both with abstract form-find

ughout my studies. I’ve enjoyed this form of representation both for its intuitive malleability, but also the rigour with which tectonics can be demonstrated ding and constructing final exhibition pieces, using the metal, wood and plaster workshops as well as delicate hand-crafting.

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