Amelia Brown
Vestiges of the Material and the Immaterial | An Extension to Dulwich Picture Gallery
North Elevation
Addressing the specifics of collage, the proposal comprises a series of temporally bound ‘accretions’ that support the London Festival of Architecture’s biennial Dulwich Pavilion programme.
School/Level
Category
- Residential
- Community and Culture
- Industrial and Process
- Education
- Leisure
- Parks and Gardens
- History and Heritage
- Speculative/Futures
Year
Located in the gardens of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, on the ground of Sir John Soane’s unrealised quadrangle scheme, the proposal assembles a temporally layered conversation with context. Its structures speaks to the present visibility, through surfaces and site-lines, but also to the invisibility of remnants and layers that are revealed through exploratory drawings.
Placing communal collaboration at the fore, the proposal’s accretions [a gallery, residence, workshop, archive and garden restaurant] extend the Gallery’s current programme, whilst reviving existing construction skills and knowledge through a new programme that supports the long-term conception, production, construction and maintenance of the pavilion installations.
Moments of differing permanence are defined tectonically, through a language of arches. The barrel vaulted forms: a temporal re-writing and deconstruction of the arch, construct a certain familiarity. They recognise the blind arcades which characterise the Picture Gallery’s elevational surfaces, through a reiteration of their datums, whilst uncovering and foregrounding their temporal alterations: affording continued conversation with the existing.
Brick [reclaimed London Stock brick and construction waste brick produced in the proposal’s workshop] is employed as the primary construction material, placing the proposition in dialogue with the material and textures of the existing Gallery and the immaterial traces of the local brick making past.