Post crit thoughts

Once again, it's been a mighty long time since my last post...mainly due to work picking up and it being just over a week until our 10,000 word deadline and today's crit.

So where am I now? It feels like the project changes every week. Perhaps this is because I was scared to propose something definite, so without committing on paper to something the project could be anything.

The architecture links the daily activities of the park, enabled and enhanced by new interventions, and a heightened awareness of one's place in space and time. A series of mundane architectural typologies are juxtaposed with the re-emerging subterranean city. Each architecture is located at particular nodes relating to the underground remains. As one engages with the architecture, they can better comprehend their position in space and time. Phenomenological parkitectures.

Overall massing programme, Verulamium Park, Ali Abbas 2009

These architectures are as follows:

• Icecream van - manifesting as an icecream parlour. This shall sit above the Verulamium Inn, burnt down and rebuilt three times during the previous life of the town. Sitting on a junction of 5 streets, the inn was in a prominent location for travellers coming into the city from London. In addition to its institutional watering hole status, the inn housed a number of social enterprises aimed at regulars including the making and selling of clothes brooches. Perhaps the presence of such a number of craftworks lead to the buildings collapse on each occasion. This architecture shall question the role of the icecream vendor as an orientational device, and how the spatial qualities evoked by the icecream van enable the park dweller to better comprehend their space and time.

Sketches showing potential ice collection/ice house/underground ice chamber, Ali Abbas 2009

• Changing rooms - a building linking the temple of Cybele beneath the earth with the ritual of sport. Involving the collection changing into sporting attire, the reorientation from daily life to that of the sportman, and back again. Also some link to the archaeological votive pits.


• Boathouse/Flood defences - situated above the old city walls and the limits of the flood plane. How does this architecture function in times when the lake isn't flooded, and what higher purpose can the architecture satisfy? Perhaps for boating, or as a refuge for wildfowl? This one really needs developing.

Environment Agency Flood Map, St Albans

The actual comments by Tony Swannel and Graham Farmer from the crit were as follows:

How does one folly relate to another?

Why is it called a Boathouse? Must it fulfil this function?

Simplify each architecture, take all of them and how they relate to one another. Look at how they reveal a meaning about place.

A charm in how they use the everyday building to uncover a meaning in a place.

John Haydock's Mask Projects

A risk that I'll do too much in each project. 'Less is more'

Simple placement, modest. 'Fairy shelter'

Simplify - simple theme applied to each e.g. threshold

Parc La Vilette

The masterplan becomes the narrative - use this drawing as the narrative

The work of Walter Pichler

Walter Pichler drawing, from Flickr, Michael.Flarion

Walter Pichler drawing, from Flickr, Michael.Flarion

Draw the architecture as settings, and draw spatially as experiences.

Sverre Fehn's glacier museum.

Sverre Fehn's Glacier Museum, Norsk Bremuseum Fjærland, Flickr, user: ChannelBeta.Net