PAVILION | Tremenheere Art Park, Penzance | Unit 21 | 2013

MEDINA PARASITE | Tangier, Morocco | Unit 21 | 2013

Tremenheere Wonderland

In October the unit traveled to Cornwall where we visited the Tremenheere Sculpture Gardens; a completely artificial manifestation of a dream landscape with large scale exotic and sub-tropical planting interwoven with contemporary art installations.
The fabricated landscape of the garden brought up an interesting question to do with nature, or rather ‘the natural’. The exotic fauna and flora that covers this ‘golden mile’ off the coast of Penzance allow the guest to be transported to a new world, as though we have fallen down the rabbit hole into a wonderland of our own imagination.
Inspired by Alice in Wonderland, this project sought to utilize the ëportalí as device to explore scale shifts and the blurring of programmatic boundaries along a path.

Medina Parasite

Initial studies of Tangier experiences were conceived based on 4 photographs that behaved as portals into the city. Inspired by the contrast between the tight, dark and winding streets of Tangiers Medina and the light and whimsical roofscape, the Medina Parasite seeks to bring public life to new heights as a hovering, expanding parasite in and amongst the roofscape of the old city. Developed as a flexible structure, the proposed parasite acts as a ‘base’ for future expansion as the need for public space increases. Moments from this base have then been re-appropriated elsewhere within the Medina as scale-shifted versions of their original function. These scale shifts not only change in size and orientation, but in their function as well: a lookout turns into a compressive prayer chamber, a dark stairwell into a viewing platform, thus recalling previous memories of past experiences.