Great Britain: A Magical Kingdom© Part 2 Project 2008 Jamie David Abraham Wallace Manchester School of Architecture Manchester | UK Great Britain: A Magical Kingdom © is a proposal for the massive reorganisation of Pennine Lancashire.Burnley, Nelson and Colne grew out of the Industrial Revolution and the production of textiles. In less than fifty years it had grown from a few fields to a series of dense urban districts. The next fifty years saw the near collapse in its industry and the evacuation of its centres. Trapped by the Pennines, failed by previous attempts to solve the problem (the insertion of a motorway that was never finished) and forgotten by the rest of the world.Attempts to preserve ‘local identity’ are key to its failings. It can’t address fundamental issues because heritage is idealised and preserved and, because the towns were built over a short timeframe, everything is heritage. Instead of responding to its current ‘sense of place’ and making Burnley more like Burnley this project proposes turning it into somewhere else entirely. Burnley, Nelson and Colne become London, The North and Edinburgh: ‘a miniature Great Britain in the heart of the Pennines’©. ‘Ride the icons of our bustling city… Relax in the spas of the Dales.’In Great Britain: A Magical Kingdom© everything is as it should be. Car parks and comprehensive schools disappear behind a façade of Tudor villages. Only the best bits are included with their location maximised to provide excellent transport links. All the towns adopt new names and are inserted with new programme in response to this idealised Britain and to provide maximum benefit to the existing population.London© is inserted into Burnley along the existing and unused Leeds-Liverpool canal (The Thames©). Rollercoaster’s wind their way through gothic palaces and form the shape of iconic architecture. Buildings look like abstracted versions of other buildings designed by better architects. Visitors spiral through car parks and villages and giant stone drums before entering a place where everything is Red, White, Blue or Yellow. Student: Jamie Wallace Scheme: Great Britain: A Magical Kingdom©Using only RIBA Gold Medal winning schemes, A Magical Kingdom© makes architecture exciting again. Britain is Great and London (Burnley)© is the greatest place of all. Great Britain© (Calder Valley) becomes apparent on GoogleEarth™. Renamed towns absorb new programme, producing idealised national identity. Expanded local suburbs release swathes of traditional terraced tourist villages.London (Burnley)© boasts a utopian skyline of the finest Contemporary, Modern and Old Town architecture, along The Thames© (Leeds-Liverpool Canal), its gateway a Stirlingesque 3000 vehicle carpark. Rollercoasters collide with ramps in endless loops around massive stone drums, emerging as iconic architectural statements over the M65.Jamie Wallace, a student in the Landscape + Urbanism College at Manchester School of Architecture was chosen to represent the School in The President's Medals Students Awards 2008.The Landscape + Urbanism College is concerned with the city, Utopia as a polemic, not a place, and the contradictory natures of contemporary space.Legislation and policy are cultural documents providing a structure that can be tested to its limits to consider what lies beyond.Functional programmes are synthesised, through an understanding and study of their systems and processes, to produce culturally legible or ambiguous form and space. Eurovision 2008 acts representing the tutorial team’s home nations scored 14 and 160 points.The college is demand lead:We demand designed banalityWe demand more heritageWe demand critical boredomWe demand ubiquitous regional specificityWe demand identical genius lociWe demand unique non-placeWe demand cultural parametricsWe demand better shoppingWe demand post-traditional formWe demand non-detailsWe demand scale-less sizeWe demand less meaningful spaceWe demand more iconsWe demand more iconoclasmWe demand generic individualityWe demand post urbanismWe demand guaranteed successWe demand imperfect utopiaWe demand anonymous buildingsWe demand serious funWe demand designer architectureCome to Great Britain: A Magical Kingdom©, it's like Britain, only greater! Tutor(s)Dr Nick DunnMr Tom Jefferies