Editing The View

“The best form is already given”

Adolf Loos from ‘Heimatkunst’, 1971.

Extending on the sketch serial visions of the promenades through the Top of Town by incorporating monolithic massing elements inspired by key urban remnants or artefacts in order to form initial design concepts.

Remnants

Extending the experimentation with form and materiality through the development of a simplified site model. The brick remnants are then assembled to form intricate paths, voids and volumes from which a greater form can be devised.

Breaking The Mould

Recalling the pensive meditations of Alvar Alto“...what may seem to be just playing with form may unexpectedly, over a long period, lead to the emergence of an architectural form.”

Tuomey, J., 2008. Architecture, craft, and culture

Coarse and unrefined yet rich in raw texture and rough tactile sensation, brick is an element of earthiness, poetry and simplicity. Sourced to allude to the material heritage of Bradford, the bricks are broken as an act of ‘liberation’. Once shattered, the pieces were carefully examined and retained on a basis of expressivity. Those chosen are to then serve as ‘models’ to form 1:500 programmatic volumes for a built scheme.

The Promenade as Poetry - A collection of Serial Visions

To facilitate the choice a site, I then investigated alternative routes to access the Top of Town in which I explored the fabric of alleyways and derelict spaces as well as material expressions and light contrasts.

The Ghosts of Time

Evidence of Bradford's once bustling industrial scene remains, lone standing amidst the new city. Although largely demolished, with a fraction of the original factories persisting, their ‘delicate traces’ on the verge of disappearance, create a intensity and poetry of space amidst which I would like my project to operate.

Ambient

Investigating alternative modes of developing site models in groups as a way to understand and familiarise ourselves with the scales, materialities and patterns of Bradford’s ‘Top of Town.’