The Lift
The Potential to be Made and Remade on a Daily Basis
Daisy Froud
Daisy Froud, from architectural practice AOC, discusses the initial design concept for the Lift New Parliament, designed by AOC with engineers Momentum and Mark Prizeman.
What are the conversations that we need to share as citizens in order to negotiate today’s particular challenges and possibilities? How might art and artists provoke and facilitate those conversations? And what kind of space will best accommodate, even stimulate, them?
The Lift New Parliament is exactly the kind of project AOC was set up to do. As architects who believe in working with people, not simply for them, we are inspired by the thought that over the coming months we will work with many others to collectively address these questions.
Our particular responsibility is the third of the above questions. But we can’t even begin to find an answer to this without starting to address the others, and it would be inappropriate in a project of this kind for us to try to find those answers on our own. Architectural competitions are strange beasts, encouraging architects to think that they can do just that.
“...a taut and tall outer vessel suspended over the earth, its edge more open or closed depending on the context, and its innards a complex, yet easily changeable, world of smaller spaces that shifts between epic and intimate...”
Generally during a competition, you are reduced to engaging in one round of call-and-response, not a real conversation, and before you know it you have a beauty-parade entry that asks to be judged as a finished object, when the real work of design has yet to begin.
Our proposal – a taut and tall outer vessel suspended over the earth, its edge more open or closed depending on the context, and its innards a complex, yet easily changeable, world of smaller spaces that shifts between epic and intimate – is just the starting point. A set of ingredients, worked into one of many possible serving suggestions. Rather than handing over a Michelin-starred finished confection, we are rolling up our sleeves for a round of Ready Steady Cook.
The Lift New Parliament project is a chance to explore ways to have a better discussion between architects and non-architects. As architect Jeremy Till calls for in his recent article on participation for Lift (www.opendemocacy.net), we are keen to develop an exchange on equal terms in which architects, to quote Till, willingly “accept the losing of some control whilst maintaining their ability to envision [and to challenge].” Our proposed collective preparation of a ‘spatial constitution’ – an evolving written and drawn collaborative brief linked intimately to the evolving practices of the Parliament – is one possible tool in this process.
As architects, we bring to the conversation an interest in what might be called ‘suggestive spaces’: spaces that can be read and used in a number of ways, and that encourage activity without dictating it. The best suggestive spaces, we suggest, are not ‘neutral’ white boxes where (theoretically) anything can happen, but spaces that are not afraid to make an interesting proposition with their form that invites and accommodates a response. Many responses.
The best suggestive spaces invite us to engage with them as inhabitants: from the house whose interesting nooks, crannies and ledges assist us in organising our possessions and choreographing our daily rituals; to art spaces like Paris’s Palais de Tokyo, where a defunct and crumbling expo hall offers a range of memory-soaked ‘unfinished’ chambers for curators and viewers to complete; to the traditional nomadic Bedouin tent, designed around the social relations of its occupants, and with the potential to be made and re-made on a daily basis. We have a hunch that the Lift New Parliament needs to have elements of all of these, but particularly the latter, able to flex itself over time to accommodate the new ways of doing politics that the Parliament aims to explore and that haven’t been imagined yet.
One suggestive space of particular relevance to this project is architect Cedric Price’s Fun Palace, a covered architectural ‘kit of parts’ designed – but not realised – for theatre-maker Joan Littlewood in the early 1960s. A landscape of flexible spaces to be operated and configured by the user, it was destined, like the Lift New Parliament, to be erected in Stratford, east London. It is intriguing, and rather lovely, to consider that those seeds sewn 50 years ago by Price and Littlewood may now flower in an evolved form under the watering can of Lift’s New Parliament project.
That remains to be seen. As we write, the conversation has yet to begin. By the time you read this, it will be underway. Hopefully, we will already have met some of you on the journey.