MArch Architecture student Connor Curley has won the prestigious Architectural Review Future Projects Student Award for his project last year entitled 'Ashpit retreat'. Connor was part of last year's MArch studio 'Future Folktales' and is now working at DSDHA in London.
The 'Future Folktales' studio explored ‘waste’ as both a problem, and a resource, in a world where new materials are becoming ever harder and more problematic to extract. The studio took as its starting point the notion that technical solutions alone are not enough, and that strong social and cultural narratives are required to effect change. Within the studio, students were encouraged to explore ways of working that utilised story-telling, and enabled them to envision and work towards long term goals, including writing, drawing and film-making. Alongside this they worked with researchers and engineers to examine and develop practical ways in which waste materials could be re-imagined and re-used, to connect the technical with the cultural.
The Ashpit retreat is a centre set amongst the marshes of south Essex. Set in the not too distant future, it provides a place of sanctuary for persecuted followers of Transhumanism, the position that human beings should be permitted to use technology to modify and enhance their minds and bodies. In Tilbury, a town caught in the growing flood zone of the Thames Estuary, a group of like minded individuals join to celebrate a few pagan festivals and create a home in the salt marshes. Over time, this transformed into a large branch of a global organisation, a DIY outpost for healing and safety.
Here the members created an island on the abandoned concrete foundations of a demolished power station. The building functions as a quasi-monastic retreat, a crisis centre, and as a sensory hub, translating data from innumerable sensors in the water, soil and air into feedback that users can tap in to. Drawing together the threads of the human and non-human, the retreat aims to bridge the gap between the current blighted post-industrial landscape and a future where the bounds of human nature are expanding.
Connor Curley
