Love lr527@cam.ac.uk

Love Raitio Self-Making Architectures

In public space, an immeasurable number of processes and actions continually create and define their own spatial contexts. The movement and idleness of people and objects; traces of their labour, ownership and waste, create and recreate an architecture long after any formal structure is built. Some of these space-making liturgies are celebrated in contemporary public design; others are hidden.

But by examining and revealing these traces in space we discover certain truths left otherwise undocumented by bureaucratic drawings, photographs, and texts. It’s in how the bins are arranged; how the debris sits on the ground; how the vehicles are parked on the patchedover asphalt — it’s there we find the stories of space being used, not in an architecture’s formal boundaries, but festered and sedimented into it through everyday use.

No architecture can be perfect; and I don’t believe that architecture’s purpose is to make space. Rather, it is to speak in dialogue with the space-making actions that inhabit it.

Through projects around the Grafton Centre including a public toilet, a rest stop for truckers, and a vitrine for maintenance, I have tried this year to make architecture that speaks and listens to these liturgies with honesty.