Practicing Transformation

The second half of the semester left the drawings behind and built something to be sat in rather than rendered. The site was three strips in the hall, each 2.66 metres wide, 80 centimetres deep and 3.15 metres high. One group built a kitchen, one a place to read and rest, and ours in the middle a place to work and meet. The bench is rammed earth, the base rammed on site into formwork we built for it and the seat modules prefabricated, rammed rough, ground to their final form and oiled with linseed oil. The movable furniture stacks into itself and disappears completely into the bench. Overhead, curved panels of Japanese knotweed and loam carry the built-in lighting, and a mounted beamer projects onto the wall opposite, with the light switch and the HDMI routing integrated into the build. The wall behind is plastered in clay, sand and brick dust, and the chairs and the table are made from the formwork timber that had just come off the bench.