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As a consequence of the growing popularity of international low-cost travel, the past few decades have seen the British seaside face increasing abandonment and decline. Yet todays ecological concerns have inspired a renewed interest in slow and local travel experiences with smaller carbon footprints, offering attractive alternatives to fast-consumption models of tourism. Overcoming the traditional one-size-fits-all offer and reconnecting on an individual basis to availability and demand have the potential to inject new life into this existing legacy of tourist facilities and its associated urban assets.
Studio 8 explores the radical re-imagination of the traditional British seaside resort. Taking the town of Great Yarmouth in Norfolk as a case study, our work draws on a post-humanist reconceptualisation of our relationship with the environment. Here a shift from the human-centred perspective entails an approach to space occupation as devised by the affective relationship of the multiple agencies of its living and non-living co-inhabitants.
An initial design workshop explored the theme of adaptive tectonics through material intelligence. Grouped in small research teams, students investigated how material behaviour might be affected by different environmental conditions, as well as the structural, environmental and space-making capabilities of a diverse range of material collaborations. A visit to Great Yarmouth offered the opportunity to engage with the local community through an intense programme of participatory activities. Working on ideas of emotional mapping, students collaboratively conducted augmented interviews via biometric sensing in Arduino. They produced a rich index of data visualisations that offered personal and localised insights into the area of study as the basis for generation of the individual design briefs.
Working with site materials, local technological solutions and cultural assets, proposals explore ideas of metastaticity and adaptability that seamlessly integrate environmental, architectural and engineering concepts. The resulting designs articulate speculative scenarios populated by transcalar programmable infrastructures which – as a response to the dynamic needs of new hybrid communities of locals and visitors – accommodate fluctuating programmes and usage of space. They also demonstrate affective, multi-agential protocols of space planning and occupation, and present architecture as a vehicle for regenerative change.