The Boxes of Strangford is a project playing with the shifts between the micro and macro elements of our built environment. On the micro level, a single box seeks to capture the essence of each material, while the macro perspective deals with challenges about placing strategies and the project’s greatest sense of flexibility. Thus the multidimensional aspects of the project seek to impact our phenomenological understanding, while at the same time challenging architects and the public alike, by bringing forth notions of ownership, control and permanence.
However, the more intriguing aspect of this project (which in all honesty most, if not all architectural projects do take the above on board) is that I am consciously and pointedly seeking to understand these aspects. Therefore this project is as much about the physical proposals as it is about the intellectual comprehension of the decided design proposal.
Based loosely around the brief of creating a cinema for the small town of Strangford, initial thoughts were to create a ‘truly’ public building, whereupon people could freely walk around, over, under and through the building uninhibited. This notion was refined down to the simple act of splitting up the building’s elements and placing them separately across Strangford.
Before initiating design work, a brief structural analysis of Habitat 67 by Moshe Safdie was carried out. It was then through an understanding of how the housing scheme structurally works, the essence of the structural system was drawn out; that of blocks being tied together. The notion, this fundamental understanding of blocks being tied together, was then literally translated into the threading and tying of each box together, forming its own structural system.
A simple project that plays with theoretical complexities.
