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The main site is Abney Park, a Victorian cemetery turned public park and urban woodland with a history of difference and contestation. Lottery-funded council plans for regeneration have been met with resistance and aim to erase the park’s past conflicts. It is an existential threat to the park.
The proposed scheme opposes the park's planned future and rejects the transition to a sanitised commercial landscape. Instead, it aims to undo the forced modernity by salvaging the cemetery's stone using ancient techniques. The stone will be reworked, re-cut and aggregated to create an architecture of aberration in various scales. Additionally, a new alternative gatehouse and a collection of micro-architectures, designed through real-time simulation methods, highlight the passage of time and indicate future transformations.
The gatehouse, constructed of salvaged and reworked memorial stone, introduced park-goers to the park’s new oppositional scheme. The entrance passageway is signposted by a long cantilevering roof held up by accentuated post-tensioned stone beams.
Salvaged stone is transported and constructed using human-powered methods. This portal showcases experimental construction methods, resurfacing the history of the culverted Hackney Brook by casting its roof onto culvert’s brick arch.
Visitors perceive and form connections to the slow cycles of cannibalistic construction that they witness, as walls are ground-cast and salvaged materials are used for both assembly tools and structure.
Structures placed around the perimeter form an architecture of 'aberration', designed as curiosities for the park's visitors. They highlight the anticipatory and picturesque qualities by honouring the end-of-life of monuments.
The demountable building is situated alongside ball-bearing transport tracks next to the Park's Chapel. Classical, carved memorial tops are repurposed as roof ballasts, reversing the role of these objects that were once symbols of status and power.