Caravanserai Gate and Dining Table

I've been working with the Canning Town Caravanserai team recently, towards this weekend's opening events. We made this six-and-a-half metre high entrance gate/billboard out of 6 cross laminated ply boards (cut according to a 1:1 template we made out of paper) covered in roofing battens -39p for 3metres- that we painted with good-old emulsion.

Red, turquoise, pink, and white on the sides, and the same deep blue as the hoardings to either side on the front. A veritable paragon of DIY polychromy. Holes were left out of the ply boards to reduce wind loads. 

None of it would have been possible without expert help from the guys at the amazing Anchor House, who put a huge amount of energy into helping us with this, both at their fully kitted-out workshop and on site, as well as with making lounge chairs from palettes for people to chill on.

below, the gate just before being finished, and a couple of hours before the opening...

 

During the day there was a market, and at night, braving the cold were around a hundred souls who joined us for a bbq and Pot-Luck meal with Latitudinal Cuisine, the centre of which was the 18metre-long covered dining table that we made out of donated scaffolding polls, boards and colourful GRP.

For the market it served as stalls, but at night, after laying some tablecloths down, adding a few fairy lights, candles, and lots of bottles of wine, it proved a more than suitable focal point for our own not too insignificant outdoor banquet.

"Cluster On Me" An Alternative development above Tottenham Court Road Crossrail Station

This was a project done over at Madam Studio, with Rebecca Harral and Marco Ginex.

We are situated in Soho, and are quite horrified at the lack of Programmatic and architectural ingenuity being shown by the proposals for what will replace the two chunks of Soho that are being/have been demolished to make way for the TotCrtRd Crossrail interchange. A rich mix of music venues, night-clubs, offices, restaurants, accomodation, schools, and buildings ranging from the eighteenth century to the 70s (hilariously the whole development is in a conservation zone) are being lost, from the area around The End and Denmark Street, to the block that housed the Ghetto, The Astoria, Dionysus and Metro, to a whole slice of Dean Street, where the old Black Gardenia, with its wooden stools and oddly dressed attendants (always made me think of Johnny Depp), and Spaccanapoli (pizzas by the metre) are all gone, only to be replaced by office blocks with token subsidised space for "culture".

We wanted to incorporate the capital benefits of both monolithic skyscraper projects, like one Canada Square, as well as the kind of groundscraper they are planning to build on the site, with the qualities of architectural and programmatic diversity that we like so much in Soho. To do this we felt that spaces needed to be found in which there was freedom for a variety of architectures, and programmes, as well as ownerships to evolve on their own course, with these "voids", or lacunae-of-design being anchored by a certain quantity of large, defined elements that would insure an economy of scale sufficient to initiate the development.

^View of Tower at Final Stage From The Corner Of Oxford Street and Hanway Place

More After The Break...