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A pastoral embassy: redeeming the civil in the absence of city

Part 2 Project 2003
Rob Martin
Thomas Morgan
Birmingham City University | UK
The project was driven by my concern of the implication of the contemporary city configured by the ferocity of market driven development. What forum of civic expression is left now that the permanence associated with architecture has been obliterated by a free market in transition?

My scheme integrates a civic embassy with pastoral oversight to reassert the concept of armature in a redundant Wolverhampton Brewery.

Establishing the schemes permanence was investigated through a concept of continuity achieved by a diagrammatic technique which subverted an initial geometrical representation of a past event on site. This embassy defies categorization, resisting strict parameters of economic performance.

Rob Martin
Thomas Morgan


The detailed diagrammatic technique Rob developed reveals in its transformation, a series of interstitial conditions which produce a memory trace of the process as well as the object. Ground no longer frames the object but becomes part of the object itself. The result is not so much a recognizable "building" as it is a potential matrix for a series of affective experiences in space and time. In this process the solid becomes the result of the impact of the space upon it.


The scheme becomes available to alternate spatial opportunities necessary in maintaining a sustainability within the urban context.

In the final resolution, the schemes integrity is based upon the presence of the body bringing meaning to life through speech and action.

Tutor(s)

2003
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