Folkets Hus - recovering a lost programme

from Memories of immersion; an immersion in memory, by Victoria Wägner

Turned from a farmhouse into a dance hall and cinema in 1925, Gröna Lid over the following years accommodated Fjällbacka's Christmas functions, auctions, a social space for summer guests to play billiard and read newspapers, and even ignited a significant local amateur theatre movement in the 1930s. In the 1940s it adapted to the growing café culture and started serving food - summer guests were offered coupons for daily lunches, and it became their natural meeting place. Every summer evening, Gröna Lid held activities including film showings, comedy, jazz performances and dances, and was also available for weddings, parties, fitness and dance lessons, and games of chess and bridge all year round. For some time it even housed coffins before burials! In the last decade the building has housed a nightclub, but closed recently and is being turned into flats and shops.

The project will seek to recover the concept of an 'all-activity house', a Folkets Hus ('People's house') to provide a meeting space for locals and bring tourists, summer guests, part-time residents and locals together for cultural and social events.

Follow the project and its explorations on

http://fjallbacka-vw.blogspot.com/

A Memory Map of Malta

part of "In Search of a Maltese Identity" by Cristina Gerada

Whilst in London, and before returning home, I drew a map of Malta from memory. It was a way of capturing all my idealistic images of home, before they would be erased by my return and by my immersion into research and hard fact. Of course the map is completely distorted by nostalgia and forgetfulness, it is in fact, perfectly inaccurate.

As I drew it I began to feel quite uncomfortable. I started to realize that it reveals more about me than about Malta, and the thought of ever showing it to a Maltese person was beginning to freak me out, because they would be able to read all sorts of things about me by looking at the map, it would be as though standing naked before them. My non-Maltese critics at university in London began to appear completely nonthreatening!

A plan began to emerge. Since this map was my version of Malta - and since I don't want the project to be completely from my perspective - I would have to get the map corrected, so that it slowly became the Maltese* version of Malta.

check the Search of a Maltese Identity blog to know what happened next...


*I say "Maltese" for lack of a better word. I wish to use a word that does not in any way exclude people who live in Malta, or consider Malta their home, but are not defined as "Maltese". However I chose to use "Maltese" because it contrasts with previous versions of Malta that were presented by colonisers, because I hope to give value to the "Maltese" perspective by mapping it.

Creating and destroying

Rachael Marshall

The creation of new buildings involves the destruction of landscapes and consumption of energy but 9% of property in the UK lies empty, and this figure is 28% in Hackney, London.

Books are revised, updated and republished periodically. Buildings tell stories and are refurbished, restored and adapted. The stories of buildings are part of the wider social and architectural story, like a chapter in a book.

The themes for this project are the intelligent re-use of unused buildings and the relationship between architectural theory and the built environment. These will develop alongside a proposal for an existing site.

Should bringing unused buildings back to life be expected in the same way that recycling a tin can is expected? How can we ensure that new buildings are capable of adaptation to different uses in the future? Heritage buildings have particular qualities that help to ensure their survival. Can these qualities be transferred to the design of new buildings?

The contract (above)makes use of the structure (the pages, spine and cover) of an old book. The pages are attached to the existing ‘structure’ with the minimum possible intervention, and so that they can be removed if the book was ever required to be returned to its original (2009) state in the future. The evidence of pages removed by previous readers (in this case many of the colour plates) is left as found. Their absence is part of the life-story of the book, in the same way that shrapnel marks on the exterior of Tate Britain remain.

This strategy echoes current attitudes to the treatment of listed, heritage buildings in the UK: any intervention to enable change of use or to meet current expectations or standards must be reversible.

Re engage with localism on Holy Island, Isle of Anglesey

by Elaine Radcliffe

Holy Island in North Wales has experienced a loss of community value. The closure of the aluminium smelter has reinforced the diminishing status the Island’s cultural heritage.

I have outlined four characteristic landscapes on the Island that will be the key drivers for a regeneration strategy: Mountain, Industrial, Water and Green.

The root to my investigation is understanding value. What it is that the community considers being most important. Possible outcomes for the landscapes may include:

Water- a gateway to the Island accommodating surrounding activity

Mountain-social housing development

Industrial – a community market

Green-a viewing point

Through sensitive thinking and re engaging with users of the landscape through workshops, I will construct a framework to mix everyday life and cultural desire. An identity landscape.

Redundant Architects Recreation Association (R.A.R.A.)

"During a time where economic inertia forces many in the architectural profession to do nothing, RARA is an energetic infrastructure that provides affordable space to do anything and everything. Welcome to the era of total creative freedom, the antithesis of the Nine-to-Five. A platform to individual design practice, with a collaborative atmosphere."

Thus proclaims the website for RARA, a small institution founded in mid-2009 in reaction to an enourmous economic catastrophe founded throughout much of the heady Noughties.

Through the Free Unit, RARA will continue its intention to design an institution that allows any individual the freedom to create on flexible terms, encouraging experimentation, enjoyment, and the provision of learning to make. RARA will explore emerging urban London contexts to find its new ideal home. RARA will investigate what it is to be an architect attempting to work outside the constraints of a professional Code of Conduct that relies on a framework which guarantees cyclical joblessness. Finally, RARA will utilise an industrial pontoon to court new followers, touring London's waterways, providing beer brewed at RARA, at the London Festival of Architecture 2010.

Memories of immersion; an immersion in memory

By Victoria Wägner

Every summer in the coastal town of Fjällbacka, in Sweden, my mother bathes in the sea early in the morning; a daily ritual of calm immersion with only water, wooden bath-huts and rounded granite boulders as a backdrop, a family tradition with roots in the town's history. But the seasons transform Fjällbacka from a thriving tourist resort in the summer to a deserted ghost town with just 1000 inhabitants in the winter - the perfect crime novel scenario for best-seller Camilla Läckberg.

The project uses childhood summer memories of bathing on the Swedish coast as a starting point to explore what lies beneath the surface of this old fishing village that over the years became a tourist-dependent summer resort.

By delving into the memories of residents and returning summer guests alike, a mosaic of particular visions of the town of Fjällbacka is being captured, allowing its layers, character and legacy to be valued and ultimately preserved and enhanced through the project. The project investigates both the narrative and the bold topography of Fjällbacka to reach a proposal that mediates between the deeply set contrasts of the town – winter/summer; tourist/local; past/present.

Follow the project on http://fjallbacka-vw.blogspot.com/

Moscow Store of Contemporary Culture

by Xenia Adjoubei


The Moscow Store of Contemporary Culture is a project which aims to reinstate non-monetary value in relation to contemporary arts, including fine art, literature, cinema and much more. The Collection strives to bring about the sacralisation of contemporary culture in today’s Moscow and integrate Russian contemporary culture into the world community.

The new building will house the art collection, main store, public store, viewing rooms and mediatheque. Follow its development here >>

“In a bizarre dream I saw how the world around me was being projected onto the night sky in the form of a zigurat, or rather that it was contained within it, some vast archive, a reflection of the city and its worries and its creations in a structure. I saw it from across the river, a large mass, an inhabited ruin, walked by shifting forms in its higher stories. It must have certain reachable recesses, inner courtyards, and a way to reach the top.”

The Mind Foundation

By Huma Ahmad

“I remember sitting there staring at you, I thought I could control you, thought I could stop your rotation. I can see a view, the horizon is bright, let dark to light be a metaphor for your life” Irfan Ahmad

My project thesis this year aims to revisit the architecture of institutions that facilitate the rehabilitation of patients with mental disabilities.
The nature of this project stems from my personal relationship with my brother, whom was diagnosed with bipolar disorder seven years ago.
Whilst visiting him during his time spent in various institutions my curiosity regarding ‘space’ and it’s effects on people became more focused on how 'space' might act positively or as a hindrance to the wellbeing and recovery of it’s users.
I began asking myself ‘How do we design spaces for people that clearly see things differently?’ and in the design and production of space ‘should order be imposed to facilitate calm in chaotic thinking or should chaos act as insight into the discovery new spatial possibilities?
These discussions are currently being tested within my project ‘The Mind Foundation’ which centers around two sites; an urban cultural centre set in the derelict site of the old Temperance hospital building in Euston, acting as a base for training, short patient stay, holistic therapy and public engagement and is a part of an on going exchange with it’s partner site based in the rural setting of Mount Snowdon, Wales, which offers a retreat for patients breaking the cycle of somatic treatment allowing them respite from the bustle of city life.
This thesis project will run in parallel with a live project based within the universities ASD projects office where I shall be collaborating with the mental health wing of the Hommerton hospital on a new design proposal for the mental health wards these lateral pieces of work will potentially assist in grounding and informing the thesis project as well as acting as a platform for testing.

In search of a Maltese Identity

by Cristina Gerada

Image of the Maltese Archipelago as it appears on a world map -
the star that marks the capital city almost covers the whole island.

Malta is a tiny island, unknown to most of the world, yet once fought over because of its strategic position at the centre of the Mediterranean. This resulted in its being taken by numerous empires: Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Normans, Sicilians, Knights of St.John, French and British, each leaving its own mark on the islands and their people.
The Maltese identity is truly post-colonial, confused by other people's projections of what Malta is or should be.

This colonial past has left Malta with a rich and varied architectural heritage, yet it seems like something is missing in today's architecture; the uniqueness that exists in our landscape, food, stories, language, habits and superstitions does not exist in our architecture.
The aim of the project is to investigate notions of Maltese identity, to give them value and in doing so to initiate a discussion and development of a Maltese Architectural Language.

Creative Roots

by Caterina Da Via

The project, set in rural Italy, is a challenge to the existing system of life in order to glimpse at new models of behaviour.
The area in which the project is being developed is called Veneto Orientale, the limb of land that stretches north-east from Venice in the direction of Trieste.
Creative Roots' challenge is to identify, describe and record all ideas, solutions and interaction of many different people involved in the project, with the aim of demonstrating that when all those fragments are combined, they can generate larger, more significant stories. The project intends to recognise existing patterns of use and traditions as awell as the need to create a new identity for the Land.
My research will attempt to go beyond the aesthetic of the new, my intent is to rethink everyday living in a small environment. It is said that chance forces human beings to start over, from scratch, challenging everything, freeing up new energies and new relationships.
I take up the challenge to rethink an architecture that strives to be local, but will arise out of diverse intelligences. The project shall show tolerance to the tradition of the land, but at the same time will be reanimated by contemporary possibilities.

Of signing a contract. Inside the Free Unit

by Xenia Adjoubei

All architecture students have an idea of what a contract is to a varying degree. Those of us with some experience of working in a practice know that there exist contractors and contracts to be signed with them, and that the other party (it appears) will always try to do everything in their power to make you breach the contract, so as to get out of fulfilling their side of it, later suggesting that you should have seen it coming. There seems to be something inhumane about a contract – is it not some physical proof that we are not prepared to trust each other? And with the construction industry being as corrupt as it is, surely we should be working by the traditional mafia rules? – as, to some degree, we do.

In the weeks leading up to the signing, all these thoughts were reverberating in our minds like unaccepted contract clauses bouncing between inboxes. We knew, of course, that the contracts we were about to sign would be quite different to those mentioned above. They are of a more delicate and poetic substance and involve making decisions about the feelings of others as well as our own. They are an exercise to make us believe that we are deciding our future and how it were to unfold over the next six months. A somewhat terrifying thought.

The Free Unit contract is an agreement of understanding between each student and the university, although it involves many other people, to crystallise the idea of the project to be carried out that year. It is like the outline brief all other students are faced with when they enter a unit. Between its pages we pledge that the varied, vast-spanning concepts for our projects would stand up to the expectations of our Friends and to the criticism of our juries, and to the disbelief of the RIBA. We wrote clauses, about existing political context, about our imagined clients and about their dreams, filled them with maps never previously seen, diagrams of future working processes, games and photographs, and it all seemed just a game.

Then quite suddenly it came to the presentation and the signing day. Being un-ritualistic as a group, we were suddenly faced with the power of the ritual, and the agreement we were entering into. On the afternoon of Thursday 5 November, Guy Fawkes Night, a distinct possibility arose: that our projects may not be deemed acceptable after all, and that our contracts would not be signed, by the school or by our witnesses and external critics.

Our guest witnesses were Lucy Musgrave (General Public Agency), and Anne Markey (ASD Projects), as well as our tutors, Robert Mull, Catrina Beevor and Peter Carl. A five minute presentation is not enough to explain the political and social context of Prizren in Kosovo (Crystal Whitaker); a miniature representation of an entire Favela in Rio (Joao Andre Wrobel); a multimedia take on the skylines of London (Alex Scott-Whitby); a retreat for those suffering from bi-polar disorder (Huma Ahmad); plants as professors in fertile learning environments for schools (Thomas Randall-Page); the future of the Redundant Architects Recreation Association (Sam Potts); or an innovative take on re-use through a library book (Rachael Marshall). Neither was it sufficient to explain the long-term creative transformation of acres of land in the Veneto (Caterina Da Via); tackling the decline of an industrial town in Anglesey (Elaine Radcliffe); Baked Potato World (Guy Shenton); the problem of CO2 legislation for all existing London housing stock (Jason Lawrence); a fairytale northern bathing idyll full of horror stories (Victoria Wagner); the re-invigoration of rural relationships around an English Estate (Jing Lu); or an archive for contemporary Russian culture in Moscow (me).

You can imagine our surprise and relief when our witnesses turned out to have a useful opinion on every single project. With a variety of subject matter so vast to draw from and the break-neck speed of presentations it was quite a relief to take our contracts in our hands, two copies, and gingerly inscribe first our own names, and then to see them passed around the witnesses and other contract parties to add their respective signatures.

The rest of the evening went off with a bang as Alex launched an official part of his contract into the night sky: wrapped around a firework.