Edgelands

The collaboration focuses on inter-disciplinary practices, the relationship between the body and environment, and material experimentation. It brought a conventionally studio-based research outside into the ‘real’ world, through a series of experimental making workshops and live performances delivered with Folkestone’s diverse communities and the environment upon which it is based, and making it widely available to the public as a contribution towards the cultural archives of Folkestone.

The project is divided into 3 acts:

Act I: Folkestone Masque
A series of temporary and site-specific ‘performing’ architectural installations choreographed as a ‘masque’, using Folkestone’s urban and natural landscapes as a backdrop. The team of year 2 & 3 architectural students was divided into 3 groups, each to develop their unique briefs with different community representatives in Folkestone.

One group worked with Matt Rowe (Make Make Make Festival) to design and fabricate a series of outdoor pavilions for the story-telling project, ‘Finding Eanswyth’. Another group worked with Andy Elliott from the Lime Bar to construct a series of wearable costumes with the potential to alter one’s acoustic experiences when moving the town. The last group worked with Folkestone’s Radio Control Bangers Club and designed and fabricated a set of modular car tracks, including 2 ramps, crash barriers, and customised radio control cars.

For one day, various installations were sited at different public spaces in Folkestone connecting streets, buildings, the harbour and the cliffs. They then came together as a large ensemble at the Garden of Remembrance outside Brewery Tap (UCA Project Space) and enacted these creations with the public in a series of carnivalesque live performances.

Act 2: Writing the City
A symposium that explores the ‘sense of place’ and its continual reconstruction in the context of the subtle shifts in the physical environment, as well as the cultural landscape of Brexit and regional regeneration. What do we mean by ‘places’ and how do we relate to them? How can we retain a sense of ‘localness’ and particularity? What are the vernacular narratives and its relationships with global movements?

Chaired by Megan Groth, the symposium brought together a panel of speakers: Matthew Butcher, Matt Rowe, Brigitte Orasinski, Holly Lewis

Act 3: Alternative Atlas
An exhibition that presents to the public a series of provocative architectural propositions that re-imagines Folkestone’s cultural landscape post Brexit, bringing together different components during a year’s research – architectural installations, experimental drawings, models and research processes that trace the invisible trail of the Pent Stream from the ancient village of Foord to the Folkestone Harbour Arm.

Gallery image credits: Nina Shen-poblete & Matt Rowe

Act II – Writing the City
Sunday 19 November 2017
Brewery Tap (UCA Project Space), 53 Tontine Street, Folkestone, CT20 1JR

Act III – Alternative Atlas
Friday 15 – Sunday 24 June 2018, 10am-6pm
Opening reception: Saturday 15 June 2018, 12-6pm
CT20 Project Space, 73 Tontine St, Folkestone, CT20 1JR

Nina Shen-Poblete
B.Arch / M.Arch RIBA

is a researcher and designer poised at the edge of architecture and art. Her work prioritises the process, and her on-going research utilises material theory and the philosophy of technical objects to investigate process as an end in itself, shaped by cultural and social forces. Nina is a core associate at S-T-O-R-E. She is co-founder and director of HOP Projects CIC (CT20). She has been an associate lecturer at Oxford Brookes University since 2013, teaching B.Arch and M.Arch courses.

Declan Molloy
RIBA,ARB.,M.Arch.

is a chartered architect with a practice Studió Ma, in Galway, Ireland, with an emphasis on the vernacular, craft and economy of material for domestic scale work. In parallel, theirs is a research that brings together ideas embedded in our personal experiences of space through narrative, drawing and material experimentation as an alternative meaning of our cultural identities.

Declan is an associate lecturer at Oxford Brookes School of Architecture, teaching both undergraduate (Unit J Lead) and postgraduate (M.Arch) architecture design. Students are encouraged to develop personal design agendas based on rigorous material experimentation, shifting the emphasis to ideas whereby architecture is developed as a spatial/tectonic assemblage, allowing for alternative strategies of inhabitation and experiences of space and place.

Megan Groth
is tech tutor for Oxford Brookes and the Assistant Editor for the forthcoming Urban Age publication ‘Dynamics of the Urban Age’ (working title, Phaidon, 2018) at LSE Cities at the London School of Economics. Megan has a degree in biology from Pomona College, M.Arch from the University of Washington and MSc City Design from the LSE. In addition to her work at LSE Cities and Brookes, she is a member of The Architecture Lobby and tries to fit in time for her own design projects. In addition to building things, her research interests include the relationship between architecture practice, context and theory; the development and design of public spaces; and issues of social inequality in the built environment.

Geoff Morrow
CEng, MIStructE, MEng
Founder and Director of Structural Mode

Geoff Morrow is the founder of StructureMode and he has over 20 years experience designing and delivering a broad range of bespoke refurbishment and new build projects. He has considerable experience designing international projects in developing countries, using local materials to make robust, comfortable and cost efficient buildings. He is an industrial partner on the EPSRC funded research project entitled ‘Health Housing For The Displaced’, led by Bath University. He has led in-house research projects to investigate, test and analyse fabric-formed concrete, tensegrity systems and compression-only structures. The knowledge and understanding gained through this work has been applied to several live projects.

Geoff is also a sculptor working mainly with steel and stoneware. Many of his pieces integrate and challenge his structural engineering. His sculptures have been shortlisted for the 2014 V&A ‘Inspired by…’ competition, and exhibited at the ‘Shoreham Sculpture Trail’ hosted by the London Group, June 2017.

Matt Rowe
B&B Project Space

Matt Rowe is an artist based in Folkestone whose object based practice is focused on vernacular symbols and the language of folklore. He often combines various disciplines, ceramics, model making and textiles to produce sculptural costumes, props and artifacts that play with notions of regional and local identity. He uses his costumes and props as a means to create unexpected structures in the landscape that echo with associations of storybook narratives and ancient legends.