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Escape To Lavender Hill!

Part 2 Project 2021
Huma Mahmood
Birmingham City University | UK
Taking inspiration from Battersea’s rich cinematic heritage, the project creates a regeneration of place through themes of escapism, trauma and nostalgia. The shopfront cinemas of the 1910’s were used as a means of escape from the everyday, providing motion picture to the working class during the peak of the industrial revolution, while decades later, The Battersea Pleasure Gardens (1951) were designed to entertain the people of London during the post-war reconstruction of the city.

Combining these themes, the project imagines a playful structure which takes over the high street of Lavender Hill, intervening into the existing landscape with classic filmic illusionary effects spilling out onto the street from behind the building envelope, allowing for an immersive experience for users to escape to after the isolating experiences of the pandemic.

Historical references are made to the crafted interventions of Battersea Pleasure Gardens, signifying entrances and exits to the site, whilst smaller cinema rooms allow for socially distanced entertainment in the style of the once beloved shopfront cinemas of Lavender Hill. The high street becomes a spectacle through the structure, inviting people to interact using tactile and movable infills, patterns and colour to add to the whimsical nature of the project.

Huma Mahmood

Tutor(s)
Alessandro Columbano
2021
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