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Demanufacture

Part 2 Project 2005
Al Morrisey
Manuela Reitsma
Oxford Brookes University Oxford | UK
The edge city; a reproductive machine of multi – layered cultural and architectural personalities. Starting life as a commercial recycling centre, the project morphs into a complex web of social interchanges, becoming occupied and taken over by the landscape whilst being administered by its’ inhabitants. The A3044 Edge city is machine, consumer and producer all at once, taking raw materials and turning them back into products that can be traded or re – used as objects, clothing and new forms of architecture. The ‘city’ is a self – sufficient machine, undergoing continuous change and metamorphosis; a living, breathing organism.

Al Morrisey
Manuela Reitsma


Al Morrissey’s expanding and mutating linear settlement on the A3044 between Staines and Heathrow offers a view of an eco-anarchistic peri-urban culture that feeds off waste from a consumption obsessed city. The scheme takes some cues from non-western city edge conditions insofar as it becomes very dense by English suburban standards, it re-recycles to an intensity that is found in shanty towns and it tightly cross programmes urban and rural processes to a create a dynamic local culture that is quite un-suburban in its edginess. These memorable images show architecture absorbed by an array of processes rather than in isolation.

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2005
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