Shortlist Announced for Antepavilion Commission 2019

Five projects have been shortlisted in the open call to design a new pavilion in Hackney

Five teams of emerging architects have been shortlisted for the 2019 Antepavilion commission. The shortlist was selected from a record number of nearly 200 entries in an open competition, and features Fettle studio, Iandelli Irving, Maich Swift Architects, Matthijs La Roi + Simone Tchonova and MISC. 

The Antepavilion is an annual commission to build an experimental piece of architecture at Hoxton Docks in East London, supported by the Architecture Foundation and Heritage Property Developer, Shiva Ltd. This year’s brief was for a 'beacon' to sit on a particularly prominent rooftop location at the Columbia and Brunswick Wharf complex.

The shortlisted teams now have two weeks to develop their projects with the help of an honorarium and an engineering consultation from AKT II. The winner will be selected by the jury after a competitive interview round in March.

The jury comprises Farshid Moussavi, Director of Farshid Moussavi Architecture, the creative designer and artist Camille Walala, David Knight, co-founder of DK-CMThomas Randall - Page, part of the team who won the commission in 2018, and Russell Gray, founder of Shiva Ltd. The jury is chaired by Chloe Spiby Loh, Projects Assistant at the Architecture Foundation and also included consultation with engineer Ed Moseley of AKT II.

Shortlist

Constructing Nations by MISC

Construction Nations, MISC

Wembley Stadium’s iconic twin towers were controversially demolished in 2003, despite being Grade II listed, and consequently erased 79 years of British national history. Whilst this moment upset football fans globally, its demolition and subsequent burial within the artificial mounds at Northala Fields also raise concerning questions about Britain’s relationship to its imperial past.

Constructing Nations will symbolically rebuild one of the twin towers in an abstract form, with the interior performatively cleaned in a duality of care for a nation currently struggling to redefine its global position, whilst referencing the nation’s self-claimed exoneration from Imperial guilt. The overarching structure allows a number of programmatic possibilities to be contained within it, hinting at a potential productive process for the construction of a positive, post-colonial British identity.

MISC was founded by current RCA students, Alistair Napier and Nathan Quainoo, exploring projects with the central themes of collective identity, hybridity, and everyday culture, within Britain's post-colonial context.

Faience by Fettle Studio

Faience, Fettle Studio

At this time, around the 200th year of the opening of Regents Canal, this proposal draws its inspiration from this very special site for 2019. The site occupies a prominent rooftop position at the Columbia and Brunswick Wharf, and presents the unusual opportunity to greet long distance views along the canal, as well as short perpendicular views.

Using handmade ceramic blocks set within a robust timber frame, this proposal creates a structural sculpture, a beacon, an indulgence in rich materiality. With scope for a long life ahead, the pavilion is able to accommodate and adapt to other purposes, such as a meeting space, a classroom or a stage.

Fettle Studio is a young multi-disciplinary design practice focused on architecture and ceramics. The company was founded in 2018 by architect and ceramic artist, Lydia Johnson, to pursue a more flexible, integrated and hands-on approach to design and craft at many scales.

Potemkin Theatre by Maich Swift Architects

Potemkin Theatre, Maich Swift

This proposal for a small theatre draws on the changing use and cultural significance of the canal-side location and presents an urban scale and bold face to the Regent’s Canal. Just as the Haggerston Baths sit empty across Laburnum Street waiting to be restored to life, or until a suitable development package comes along, this little theatre of the everyday at Timber Wharf, balanced on the edge of the rooftop, is a beacon full of potential waiting for occupation.

The architectural concept has an emphasis on flexibility in use, making it suitable for happenstance meetings between the residents of Timber Wharf or for a wide variety public events. Theatrical productions, small music concerts, film screenings, soapbox speeches, comedy shows, exhibition and display, could all form part of a cultural programme.

Maich Swift Architects was founded following a period of 5 years working together at Caruso St John Architects on the design and construction of various projects including the 2016 Stirling Prize winning Newport Street Gallery. The practice is committed to the successful delivery of ambitious and characterful schemes and approach each project with care and rigour. 

Proto-Selfbuild by Matthijs La Roi + Simone Tchonova

proto-selfbuild

 

The PROTO-SELFBUILD proposes a process of direct participation in it’s construction, situating itself within the historical lineage of radicalism in Hackney. The borough continues to be a site of tension between the top-down developer modes of building architectural projects and the bottom-up necessities of the local citizens, resulting in the displacement of communities and a shortage in housing.

The premise of the PROTO-SELFBUILD is a system which can be deployed in vacant plots of land by various groups of ordinary people. It uses a primitive and intuitive method of stacking spatial elements on top of eachother one by one. The resulting part-to-whole relationships establish a quasi-emergent construction process and design outcome. Where each element’s form and position respond to the one placed before and after it. The aim is to create a collective assembly of user-builders and empower them to take control of their environments, similar to the ambitions of British architect Walter Segal and Belgian architect Lucien Kroll.

Matthijs la Roi graduated from the faculty of architecture at the TU Delft in 2012. Since then he has worked on a wide range of design disciplines including Architecture, Urbanism, Naval Architecture and Public Art. He has a strong interest in bottom up design methods that involve simulation, performative evaluation and self-generation algorithms.

Simone Tchonova is a Canadian architectural designer and RIBA Part II based in London. Simone’s design methodology aims to be active, reactive and disruptive. She works at an intersection with the socio-political and design driven experimentation. Her work criticizes the mundane standardization prevalent in architectural practice.

Trojan Horse by Iandelli Irving

Trojan Horse

Trojan Horse looks to confront our uncertain socio-political futures through the themes of legacy, waste and storage. It is a temporary monument for Columbia and Bruswick Wharf and a provocation for the imagination of potential futures. When intervening within the built environment we must consider the implications and influence on our collective future and how the next will readapt and continue the cycle of change.

Our proposal bases its present on that of its future, by expanding on ways in which it can be repurposed and re-altered. In the future, our structure will be retired to give place to new work, our structure will offer raw uncompromised store bought materials to be converted by future participants or the myriad of London based makers. The pavilion will be assembled entirely from standard size materials, which will be essentially unaltered and used as they are. This idea acts as a provocation to the possibility of future use. Alongside the production of practically zero waste, the heightened reduction of on site work and manual labour allows for more capital to be spent on raw materials to then be offered in succession.

Lorenzo Iandelli and Jamie Gatty Irving both share an education divided between the UK and Switzerland. They enjoy approximation, pop culture and putting things on top of one another. In doing so, their work looks to find a rigor of thought, only to then contradict it with the irrational aspects of composition.