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Demanufacture

Part 2 Project 2005
Al Morrisey
Manuela Reitsma
 Oxford Brookes University Oxford | UK
The edge city; a reproductive machine of multi – layered cultural and architectural personalities. Starting life as a commercial recycling centre, the project morphs into a complex web of social interchanges, becoming occupied and taken over by the landscape whilst being administered by its’ inhabitants. The A3044 Edge city is machine, consumer and producer all at once, taking raw materials and turning them back into products that can be traded or re – used as objects, clothing and new forms of architecture. The ‘city’ is a self – sufficient machine, undergoing continuous change and metamorphosis; a living, breathing organism.



Al Morrissey’s expanding and mutating linear settlement on the A3044 between Staines and Heathrow offers a view of an eco-anarchistic peri-urban culture that feeds off waste from a consumption obsessed city. The scheme takes some cues from non-western city edge conditions insofar as it becomes very dense by English suburban standards, it re-recycles to an intensity that is found in shanty towns and it tightly cross programmes urban and rural processes to a create a dynamic local culture that is quite un-suburban in its edginess. These memorable images show architecture absorbed by an array of processes rather than in isolation.
Tutor(s)
2005
View from the banks of the Staines Reservior - Project concept - 'Demanufacture'; the fusion of technical and natural landscapes, a project on new forms for the edge of the city.
Site Location - the edge city runs through the centre of the reserviors along the A3044, in close proximity to Heathrow Airport. A timeline of progressive growth and decay is established.
Site Plan - a combination of synthetic and natural elements strike a delicate ecological and cultural balance, based on waste paper products being broken down into a reuseable matter.
The sum of all parts - Element combination - the primary recycling arches merge with the landscape to create a new environment; Snapshots of the edge of the city. An implied tension between the technological and the physical.
Detail views of the primary arches - Sustainable forms of architecture derived from the raw material recycling process to create space for living, working, researching and propagandaist activities.
The development of the architecture from concept to inception places the arches stradding the A3044 at the focal point for all other activities occuring within the area. Moving from North to South, the architecture taks on new uses and meanings.
View from the A3044 - The 'demanufacture' arches in motion, scavenging for raw material left by passing vechiles through the voyeuristic experience of the A3044, in order to start the assimilative process of creating useable matter.
Elevated view looking down onto the A3044. The architecture of this new form of edge city responds to its environment and cultural balance, combining a number of uses into a continuous process.
Between the A3044 and The King Edward IV Reservoir. As the edge city develops in scale and production, sections are discontinued and are taken over by the landscape, creating a new fusion of spaces that form an implied environment of slow decay.
Looking across the Southern section of the A3044. The architectural forms respond to the voyeuristic nature of the edge city process, creating a variety of uses.
Looking across the Northern section of the A3044. Raw material gathered from scavenging within the arches of demanufacture creates an endless source of matter that can provide sustainable forms of architecture that in turn are broken down and rebuilt.
Floating on the Staines Resevior. The storage and production of materials leads to the conception of a new form of architecture in permanent motion - the Paper Tower, positioned at the North of the A3044.
The paper Tower operates on a system of a structural cardboard frame clad in layers of paper that vary in thickness, texture and quality of light - infinite spatial arrangements are possible according to levels of occupancy and prescribed use.
Physical modelling expresses the way in which the Paper Tower offers a homogeneous structure that can be commercial or residential. New spaces can be cut from walls of various form and thickness.
The towers straddle an artificial coastline to the North of the site, in continuous motion as their shape, form, colour and quality of translucency change by the hour. The paper skin rustles in the breeze as water laps at the base......
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