Circles and Ritual: Two Approaches to Form

This post is a re-evaluation of work produced for a student project based in Nine Elms from 2014/15. We have already discussed an approach to understanding this particular area, now it seems prudent to see how I actually responded. 

To briefly contextualise, the brief entailed the creation of a mixed use tower of about 30 storeys. That's about it. Given our programmatic freedom, I became fixated on the dominance of the proposed US embassy over the masterplan. I suggested, in opposition, a collective diplomatic mission that allowed smaller countries to cohabit and thus access facilities otherwise reserved for larger powers. There are a number of other embassies being inserted into Nine Elms, and given the state of global flux we are currently experiencing, my proposal became a counterpoint to the American project and explored the balance between civic representation and public engagement. Ultimately it was a bit shit, but a couple of interesting strands of thought developed.

Chief amongst them was the idea of monumentality, ritual and their relationship to the public realm. The most interesting part of my brief was the creation of an assembly space on the ground levels. There were two very different (and probably quite contradictory means) by which I arrived at the conceptual position that determined the form of this assembly [ritual] space. 

The primary issue I found in developing such a pluralistic international brief, was how to represent all cultures equally. It would have been too easy to simply take the Eurocentric approach and smugly use its historically pervasive reach across the globe as pretext for creating a fundamentally Western building. The building required universality, but not ubiquity. It had to be special for everyone and exclude no-one at any time in the building's use (a key aspect of the brief was that diplomatic missions could come and go as their countries expanded and contracted). This was largely impossible to achieve ingenuously within the timeframe as the actual purpose of this year was to fulfil various technical aspects of the ARB Part 2.

So I quickly dove into typology. I noticed a certain similarities between ritual and gathering spaces throughout history. Primarily that they are circular in plan.  I set out distil this into a several archetypal spaces. I then compiled it into that most visually arresting of formats, the matrix.

The column headings describe the particulars of each object and the rows arrange them in time.

Name: obvious
Locus: place where the example of each archetype can be found
Behaviours: what fundamental purpose/ activity inhabited the object
Conception: refers to Gideon's three conceptions of space and the key formal attributes
Intrinsics: Which aspect of humanity was best embodied by the object (inspired by Superstudio's Fundamental Acts series)

The matrix provided an understanding of what the form 'circle' meant on a basic human level and its inherent application across human history. Although in hindsight all of these examples are Western (we just can't help ourselves). However sleep deprived and excitable at the time, I was convinced that it was the only plan form suitable to the task of providing my imagined cohort of embassies with a worthy space to congregate. The work intended to analytically show a lineage for the Assembly Space that transcended any particular culture and related instead to something fundamentally more human. 

Then I leafed through Yes is More.

It then occurred to me that perhaps the sober analytical approach wasn't the best means to find the origins of the Assembly Space's form. I had been attracted to the unit because at the bottom of the abstract were the words 'speculated environment'. Whilst this probably referred to the vacuous crap that was intended to populate Nine Elms, I felt that the lack of actual context could be an opportunity. 

Every culture on Earth has some form of origin story, so I thought I could make one up for my building. So I drew a wee comic feeling it was only way to honestly portray such a dishonest means for conceiving of a building. But this was a speculative environment, so why not?

The purpose of the comic was to imply that the Assembly Space was a found archaeological artefact. The details were kept vague, it was only a shell that had passed out of time and memory. Its original purpose lost. Its original meaning eroded. But the edifice remained, latent and waiting to be filled with rituals once more. 

The purpose of these two pieces of work was the same; to create a universally understandable concept for the collective Assembly Space. However they differ radically as both modes of representation, levels of seriousness and a desire to subvert. I have placed them here chronologically and to this day I cannot tell whether this was a conceptual progression or a descent into madness. Below are drawings of the final scheme. You can decide for yourselves which direction I took.

Plan Level -1, 0, 1 

Cross Section

Perspective Images

Axonometric