live project: fish island, hackney wick

As part of a live project to regenerate a terraced house in the cultural area of Hackney Wick, London,  thirty students from Oxford Brookes University spent four weeks designing, fabricating and building installations to accommodate a group of artists into the space.

My group focussed on designing the roof terrace, seating and transforming the adjacent interior space into a cafe area. We based our concept on the tea-making process; the ritual of picking ingredients, brewing, conversation, and story-telling.

The step in the process, of feeding out information, or exhaling, responded to the conditions on our site. A number of air conditioning units surrounded the perimeter of the terrace, which fed out waste energy from the building. We wanted to use this link between inside and outside, to form a spacial relationship between the spaces.

The solution we came up with was 'bubble' inflated by the waste heat coming through the air conditioning units, which houses the storytelling part of the ritual. Working backwards, mint plants and a steaming urn are placed outside the bubble, timber seating and a shoe rack are provided around the perimeter and inside, we hung a sea of space blankets to direct and feed people outside, or seat people in the landscape below, where we fed back the stories that were voiced within the bubble. A mural painted on the exterior wall accentuated the 'exhaling' and 'feeding' nature of our intervention.