Weeks 4 and 5 in the Emergent studio were spent working in teams or solo on a real competition brief based in downtown Copenhagen. Here, amongst a masterplanned but unfinished urban sprawl we placed our interventions of church like (but not neccessarily faith based) forms, drawing people from the tube line station towards an urban square.
Simon Drayson and myself got 'married' once we realised that we were interested in the strata of the region, and teamed up to create a series of little buildings using the local stone and clay as driving ingredients. We created our own new brick dim and delivered a story of clay excavation, brick firing and place making amongst the tundra of bush and silver birches just beyond the urban square.
Once leaving the station visitors fix their attention to a bell tower standing along at an angle resolved with due west in the square. Beneath the brick mass a ramp encourages the pedestrian down and across the urban edge into the natural landscape just beyond. Here a Hearth and surrounding Chapels connect the visitor with aspects of nature, phenomena and spirit. The Hearth represents both the furnace of the fired bricks and the heart of the space. The Sky Chapel holds a floating concrete drum at its centre, set just 1 metre from the ground plane, inviting the visitor to duck under and look up to the sphere of air and light above. The Horizon Chapel squeezes the view of the landscape into a sitting position, harnessing the cosy nature of the space.
The crit was in-camera, anonymous and will remain un-marked (all things I agree with). We worked mainly in pencil and graphite, scanning these drawings over a CAD framework to add to the atmosphere. Feedback was excellent for all involved and the boards could be seen on the third floor near to the school office.
