Critical Reflection

Architecture as a vehicle of Didacticism; this project seeks to explore the methods and principles that could inform desirable qualities from a centre of making, learning and community engagement. The process of ‘making’ has several interpretations yet all with a similar sense of purpose and potential. Dundee has a theatrical past filled with industry and making, from linen and flax mills to jute and the boom of the local textiles industry, Dundee was at the forefront of global production throughout the 1800’s. This era was all based around hands-on production, workers were skilled and machines basic but precise - fully constructed and maintained by hand. These elements have been in decline through modern times, with a complete shift of Dundee’s prominent industry overseas.

This architecture wants to bring the ideas and concepts of making back into the city of Dundee and back into the local community. There is a certain theatricality about the hustle and bustle of industry and making – the didactic elements of learning by seeing and engaging with crafts or skills, expressed poetically through Maurice Broomfield’s photography of post-war Britain. Expression of this quality has since been lost, but there is an underlying cultural appreciation of the ‘making’ that used to take place all across the city, and specifically in the Roseangle and West End areas – that used to house a vast amount of the working/making population.

However, there has been emerging creative cultures within Dundee recently with great success and interest – a great example of this new culture is the success of ‘Dundee Contemporary Arts’ designed by Richard Murphy Architects (see precedent chapter), providing spaces for activity across a variety of interests from film to printmaking. The DCA creates and engaging common ground for different communities, similar to the aims of this project in which the new culture of creatives and technological manufacturing is merged with the history and tradition of the making activities and industry that once dominated the area.

In a parallel sense the merging of cultures comes with the juxtaposition between new and old. A contrast that can bring great quality and richness to architecture and space. This is a feature of expression within the project, utilising part of the existing warehouse building that has stood since the early 1900’s with a beautiful brick wall on the West that has been adapted and built up over time – producing an incredible array of textures, materials and sense of history. This brick wall makes up only a portion of the architecture however it acts to inform

the development of both the site and the programme strategy. Slotting a newly fabricated steel structure inboard to the brick but leaving it exposed internally around the entire building as a method of expressing the structure and tectonics the architecture is becoming. The joints and marks of the hands who assembled it on site with precision and skill as a didactic moment of expression to what the building physically is made from but more importantly what the architecture discusses and explores. Employing new materials and techniques to draw attention to how we now make and assemble elements – stating the brick wall is where we came from – and the sophisticated steel and metal work as where we are now. Within combination of these two elements is housed the centre of making, learning and engaging with this discussion of which the poetic expression and theatrics is crucial to the success of the architecture. Achieved by using precision, detail and material in a manner to create intentional ‘moments’ within and externally to the spaces, to provoke interest and be studied by visitors and passers-by alike, with a unique opportunity present down the narrow lanes that flank the site to the East and West.

Use of the existing brickwork also creates a parallel between the made and the manufactured – the clay cricks being produced in a very different sense to the modern steel joints. However, they share some qualities of marks and ghosts of production and makers, the design proposal is using this as a platform to form an expressive and intellectual architectural language.

Pairing the above elements with an architectural strategy that proposes adaptability of spaces and how they are used/interacted with and the aims of fully engaging the community amongst the buildings programme and intentions creates a harmony of didacticism and function. Extending the public realm into the building with a fully activated entry level with the aim of using gallery spaces to draw in visitors to journey through the art of ‘making’ – each of these elements are reinforced with materiality and celebration of the building joints, marks and scars of the people who designed, constructed, and use the architecture. Each internal space amongst the elements that form the building has visual and volumetric connections to each other as well as the context to fully emphasise the public engagement, with no corridors and views to the variety of exciting activities and practices operating and learning within the centre. With the aim of bringing back the qualities of making in every interpretation amongst a social, didactic, and poetical collection of spaces and atmospheres.