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Komfort Award

Geological Archive

Part 2 Project 2007
Ed Butler
Liverpool John Moores University Liverpool | UK
Rooted in the Menai Valley, the project reacts to ancient frameworks and derelict industries, connecting with the landscape - a place for geological knowledge and craft, a store and research facility, to reinvigorate past activity.

A disused railway cutting crosses the site, much of the building held within it, clinging to its walls. An ancient axis intersects this cutting – a Neolithic ‘cursus’ line, creating a place of new activity and intensity.

Geological core samples inform the functions. Hung vertically on hand-operated overhead rail systems, they circulate, entering public and private spaces, appearing as sculptures, artifacts, and technical resources.



The thinking and drawing evidenced in a dialogue with this project inhabits core spaces in our minds – deep history, the industrial ‘mutation’ that has brought us to a brink, and proposed ‘footprints’ that architecture is now called on to lay down.

The evolved project re-interprets the primal ‘density’ of the circle (the Cyclotron), re-inhabits an industrial ‘wound’ (as ‘vie quotidienne’), while in the valley below, a strategy for the port of Dinorwic to become a positive, rather than a sad, part of the 'congested century'.

This project, by its depth, announces an arrival on the architectural scene.


2007
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