We had our first crit of the year on Friday 15th, which was the culmination of the introductory group project (myself, Keerthigan Thavaseelan and Rebecca Alexander). This year the project centred around the idea of relocating the Herbert Reed Gallery (currently re-purposed as a teaching studio) to somewhere within Canterbury.
We made a decision as a group to explore something that was a bit more fantastical, rather than looking to provide a financially viable project. The brief had made no mention that the school wished to see financially viable projects, but the undertone during the crit belayed that subconscious desire, with a few groups being pulled up on whether the projects were realistic when targeted through such a lens. I have a feeling that our project skirted around such issues by not intending to be a ‘realistic’ proposition in the first instance, allowing it to remain more in the state of a conceptual question, and thus treated as such during the review.
Two key items focused our own agenda - firstly, the prevalence of disparate, often clashing aesthetic and architectural elements within Canterbury (whether for good or ill), and secondly, a quote from Herbert Reed:
“It is more important to realise by what act objects come into beings, because the nature of the act partly determines the character of the object. But first of all there is one act without which no object can come to life, this is the act of imagination.”
These two items led us to offer an architectural object with juxtaposed organic and inorganic forms nestled within the shell of a currently derelict store at the corner of the High St and Guildhall St. Below are the submitted slides:
