Projet de Lorène Faure et Cécile Ortolo, étudiantes à l'ESA en semestre 6 pour le studio d'OSA (
Office for Subversive Architecture) dans le cadre de la réhabilitation d'une caserne de pompiers à Bristol (UK)
Using only pieces of timber, we managed to create a wooden mesh that contaminates the building, and creates a complex extension to the existing building. This use of material determined a very easy constructive solution. Indeed, by simply layering a piece of timber on top of another, and assembling them together, the mesh is easily constructed, and offers a very strong resistance to tension and compression. This mesh is all the stronger as it is connected to the old fire station, and relies on it. This timber mesh is a real urban landscape. It mutates into stairs, platforms, so that people can walk on it an atmosphere.
In order to complement this dark underground atmosphere we decided to create a skate park. Using the same pieces of timber, but assembled in a very particular way, we managed to create very smooth surfaces. These surfaces becomes devices for the skaters, such as half pipes, curbs, …Etc. A part of the ground floor is dedicated to this activity. Creating a skate park was a way to bring life into this very decayed building.
Creating a skate park wasn’t enough. The building had to attract different people, a wider audience. We therefore decided to create a museum of visual arts, in order to promote an ill-known art.
Inside, underneath the wooden mesh is a very spacious exhibition space. Artists are free to come and show their art, without any sort of regulation.
It is a space given to the artists' community. This site used to be squatted by unknown artists, and we wanted to create a real place where they could expose their work, and get a chance to be acknowledged and recognised by society.
Besides the horizontal circulation on the open space of the ground floor are a number of staircases, sculpted into the wooden mesh, that lead you to small sculpted rooms, cocoons. From these semi-suspended spaces, you have a privileged view of the skate park.
They are sculpted in order to create seating. From each cocoon, you can attend to a visual projection (a screen is suspended from the ceiling). The project was therefore about creating small intimate pockets, from which you can enjoy the work of an artist, but most of all to bring back life into this beautiful decayed site.
We were very interested in the notion of freedom: the freedom in which the mesh is expressing itself, the artistic expressive freedom…Etc.
This notion was brought to another level when we realised that Bristol had a very important natural wildlife, particularly birds. Birds are the essence of freedom; therefore we chose to integrate them to our project. Out of the same pieces of timber, the mesh is at one part becoming a “tower”, a bird shelter.The idea was of course not to tame the birds, but to offer them a place to rest, and to integrate them better to the city, and its architecture.
This post surely requires an explanation. Presenting my own work on boiteaoutils can probably interpreted as an hijacking of an information platform and its readers taken in hostage of an autopromotion. However I did feel that criticizing and promoting others' project has a sense for me, only if it was to create a more or less coherent vision of architecture which should be serving my own creation. Therefore, I would like to take the risk of presenting my work as related to this vision. Spiculation is my diploma project I developped with Martin Le Bourgeois in ESA and I am not presenting it here as an achievement but as a work still in progress. We are currently working on it to make it happen for real, working with polypropylene company and developping it for competitions etc. Valérie Chatelet, our former tutor and author of Interactive Cities, now joined the team.Of course your advices and criticism are more than welcome.
Spiculation incarnates an alternative to public space’s hermetism. Its aggregate composes a malleable material which can be transformed at any moment by anybody. The alternative it represents to linked and precise architecture generates a flexible implementation of a fluid material resulting from multitude. In fact, energy it needs to make its shape evolving is very inferior to the one public space’s material needs today. This material comprises intrinsically some qualities based on structure, light filtration and rain evacuation.However, in order to be colonised, it needs some tools inventions whose conception and fabrication is let to public space actors. Participation principle is simple. Thanks to a manifest to Haptic, only the body’s direct action with its environment provokes a desire’s spatiality. Spiculation is inspired from Peter Cook’s Instant City, from Bernard Rudofsky’s Architecture without Architects, from R&Sie’s viab in I’ve heard about and from Yona Friedman’s ville spatiale whose it explodes the megastructure then fragment it in order to invade the existing context.Thanks to a concern not to override its alternative statute, it does not live inside the cartographic public space. In fact spicule is afraid from the “canyon” street, too much directional and too much controlled. It prefers to proliferate inside some heterotopia which are represented by Paris’ interior courtyards and thus to create a wandering network whose absence of control is tacitly accepted by the person who is penetrating into it. Spiculation's production is also ruled by the in situ logic. The productive machine is invited to live inside the courtyards by adapting itself to their spatiality and functionality. This presence on the site allows the local plastic waste in order to make the spicule’s unique material. Thus, urban material deals with an ambiguous relationship between consumption, waste and its’ production.Automated fabrication platform is situated several metres above the ground. In the course of production, a spicule tide comes filling this void. Material finally produced is colonized and used by its actors at the whim of their desires materialising them into a vanishing and manifest device.Spicules embody thus a constant redefining architecture impossible to plan and whose intrinsic uncertainty makes its control difficult. They are the object of the individual power non delegation and offer its expression to anybody at any moment.
