Under the Flyover, Bristol (United Kingdom) 2016
University of the West of England
Our client was Anna Wilson – the arts and community project manager for the Cabot and Clifton East Neighbourhood arts project. During our first consultation she explained that the Cumberland Basin Piazza had been in a state of disrepair for a long time and that recently she had been active in consulting the community and generating ideas for an intervention on the site.
Through consultations it became clear that the local community were interested in three areas of improvement – they included the greening of the site, activities for young people and performance spaces. We were given the task of creating a series of temporary physical experiments to realise the ambitions of Anna and the local community working with these three key conditions.
As part of Bristol Green Capital 2015 Anna was involved in an event called Portway Sunday Park. We were asked to design and build a band stand as a way to initiate community engagement, fulfil the ‘performance’ criteria of the brief and to create a centrepiece for the Sunday Park event. This event generated interest and momentum in the physical experiments that we proposed for the Cumberland Basin Piazza. We were able to design and build a series of temporary play interventions and with help from community members we met during the Portway Sunday Park we hosted an event on site exhibiting these ideas.
Client: Anna Wilson and the Cumberland Basin Community
Students: Luke Carnaby, Luke Copley-Wilkins, Matthew Smith, Thomas Sale
Research Question: To explore the potential of grass-roots creativity and hands-on community engagement to enhance and intervene in the areas of slack space beneath and around highway infrastructure.
Links: Hands-on Bristol
United Kingdom, Architecture, Initiated by institution, 0-10, Self-funded, Temporary, Postgraduate, Propositional, Collaboration, Students, Urban Design, West of England Univ.
