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Registry/Repository - a charged void

Part 1 Project 2007
Helen Goodwin
Kingston University Kingston | UK
Forming an extension to the Lambeth Palace complex within its gardens to the north, and facing the Palace of Westminster across the river, the building marks the threshold between city and nature, citizenship and self.

Within the containment of its walls the act of registration - which takes place within the context of everyday life - embodies these dual notions of identity and marks the institutionalisation of the body.

Housing also a public archive and the Society of Genealogy, where the past acquires new meaning within the context of the present, the building sets up a spatial and material narrative based on the intersection of a horizontal axis of cyclical, 'lived' time and a vertical axis of compressed time.

Helen Goodwin


Helens project situates itself between the Palace of Westminster and Lambeth Palace as a mediator of everyday life and an archive of local history of people and place and a gateway to the gardens beyond.

The strategic moves are to provide a large vessel providing the formal spaces bounded by an informal structure to the Palace gardens. The primary route acts as a processional measure connecting the smaller vessels of activities: registering and celebrating a marriage – with an intermediary space hovering over the archive [history] for registering a birth or death.

The project is succinct and spatially rich.

2007
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