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Summer Show 2023
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Playing Politics: A People’s Parliament

Project details

Programme
Unit PG12
Year 4

The fast-eroding North Yorkshire coastline is set to be pushed to breaking point; environmentally, socially, and politically. The prospect of such ruination demonstrates the need for an alternative political solution.

Playing Politics: A People’s Parliament imagines a socialist government in North Yorkshire, with the Environment Ministry sited on its North coast. The project proposes a system informed and led by local people’s priorities. The Ministry will observe, monitor, and react, accordingly as a test bed for a socialist architecture that seeks to re-build its community.

The architectural response is realised through political, material, and seasonal transitional timelines which co-exist, both in time and physicality, to enable the political transition. Built from eroding clay, the architecture contracts and expands in accordance with environmental and political requirements. Leaning on the theatricalities of both politics and construction, the project is further defined through four acts of a political ‘play’. Community and the need for radical change are re-embedded into the landscape, as a methodology for redefining connections between the land, the sea, and the people.

Act I: The Bill Reading

The first of the four acts is a bill being read in parliament. Set at spring high tide, water enters the debate chamber, and the architectural forms move in response. The politics are interrupted and shifted as a result of the natural movement.

Act II: The Vote

The second act is the vote that occurs when many people descend on the site to vote in matters for community and its environment. Plastered clay covers the sides of the voting corridor, weathering as people pass through. Everybody is able to vote.

Act IV: The Parliamentary Recess

The end of the political cycle is marked by the parliamentary recess that allows for the necessary architectural maintenance and re-construction. The MPs must ensure this process occurs and is successful in order to restart the political cycle.

Tactical Decision Making

Considering the relationship between the architectural and the political, construction is used here as a political interruption. Mimicking the interruptive environment in the house of commons, the red chairs question the power a chair can hold.

Act III: The Select Committee Meeting

The third act describes the select committee meeting observed by members of the public passing through the building on their way to the beach. The timber floor is being laid, referencing the architecturally political decision-making processes.

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The Bartlett
Summer Show 2023
23 June – 8 July 2023
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