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Serjeant Award for Excellence in Drawing

The Institute of Concrete Poetry

Part 1 Project 2014
Oliver Riviere
 University of Brighton | UK
At the northern end of Regent’s Park John Nash’s vision of architecture, streets, vistas and greenery ends and the park meets Regent’s Canal and Camden Town. This is a place of neoclassical facades, mews, vistas, tow paths, brick and stucco. This project explores how to design buildings within this established architectural context and landscape.

The proposals are sited on land currently used as the London Zoo car park. A new terrace continues the wall of buildings edging the park, lining the Outer Circle to provide a formal end to Nash's development. A filled-in arm of the canal is reinstated across the site. The Institute of Concrete Poetry occupies four divisions of the proposed terrace providing a range of spaces for reading, writing, talking, thinking, study, gathering and celebration. Both the grand occasions and mundane events of institutional life take place within a characterful architectural setting.

The design is born from a game of consequences, playing with the themes of transition, thresholds, possibilities and combination to produce an outcome that had not necessarily been foreseen. Beginning with readings of local buildings and typologies, the work was approached in series, each set of drawings or models aiming to progress the project further towards an architecture. The series maintain a level of fragmentation or combination at each turn allowing them to ask as many questions as they answer. Reflecting on these questions and possibilities informed the next translation of each spatial or architectural element. New forms and spaces were suggested and collected, enabling some to be chosen and stitched together into the final scheme.

The Institute of Concrete Poetry aims to be a continuum of related spaces, occupied transitions rather than closed rooms. The rhythm of the terrace provides a set of limitations, an overall order of regular divisions, bays and window openings within which a collage of thresholds can take form. Thick exterior and party walls allow semi-hidden or unexpected spaces to open up. The house divisions alternate between more standard London terrace planning and eccentric spaces, an architecture of simplification in some places, expansion or fragmentation in others.


Tutor(s)
2014
The Institute of Concrete Poetry - Regent's Park.
Draw Everything Axonometric - Cumberland Terrace Mews North - a close reading of the existing Regent's Park terrace typology, its external thresholds and spaces of transition.
Meridian Models 1 and 2 - Initially generated by trying to model a passage of text, the results were then taken through another process of translation to build a second model.
Possibilities Models – Card studies of qualities of threshold in local buildings were repeatedly combined, translated and remodeled to create novel forms.
Threshold Space Studies – Spaces within the Royal College of Physicians and British Academy were drawn and redrawn, translated into new imagined spaces; these two institutes stand at either end of the Regent Street/Regent's Park urban sequence.
Plan Series – Spaces that had been investigated were collaged together inside a terrace to suggest linked rooms, routes, transitions and connections within an overall order of regular house divisions, bays and window openings.
Axonometric Series 1 - By playing with the ambiguity of the plans, various spaces could be extruded to imagine ground floor (top), basement (lower left) and first floor arrangements (lower right).
Axonometric Series 2 and 3 - The design for the new institute was progressed by combining and arranging several precedents and investigating spaces encountered on particular routes through earlier drawings.
Sectional Perspective - Resulting from a series of collages imagining how the building might work in section.
The New Institute in Regent’s Park - Positioning the project, its associated buildings and site strategy within the context of Nash's development, the canal and the existing terraces lining the park.
Ground Floor Plan - Showing transitions from Regent's Park to the Regent’s Canal through the proposed new terrace and two of the four houses that form the Institute of Concrete Poetry.
Plan Detail - Institute of Concrete Poetry.
Perspective - The entrance hall of house No. 11, part of the new institute.
Sectional Model – Investigating the creation of more standard spaces in one house of the proposed terrace in contrast to a collage of thresholds and spatial complexity across an adjacent party wall.
Moments Models - A series of moments within the institute buildings, investigating an architecture of simplification in some places, expansion or fragmentation in others.
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