Despite living around the corner, I quite magnificently failed to visit the £60k house ‘Designed for Manufacture’ competition winner outside New London Architecture a couple of months ago. Never went to see the interior; never got any good pictures of it complete (though Rob Annable did that). I grabbed two pictures of it in construction (see the first two below) but that was it. And then it was gone.
I did however document its rapid ‘defabrication’; the destruction and removal of the building from the site. It took one month to build, but was removed remarkably quickly, over the course of a few days – scaffolding erected; exterior cladding removed; interior gutted; dismantling of structure; emptying of small rubbish into bags and with larger parts picked up by trucks. It left a strange void for a few days – we’d just got used to it being there. And now it’s totally forgotten (last image below taken earlier today). The architecture of Cedric Price & Archigram was sometimes intended to come and go just as quickly. And although this was a ‘fake’ insertion of a building as an exhibition piece, rather than an actual home, it was interesting to observe its disappearance. Photo-story below …
Haha! Our first collaboration. I’m so proud 🙂
These are even more valuable than the shots of it complete. I love the void on the one third from bottom.
It’s not every day I get a ‘nice void’ compliment. Cheers Rob 🙂
By the looks of it, they didn’t actually recycle/save any of it. Isn’t that rather depressing – that the pre-fab can’t actually be de-fab in the same seamless way, and carted off to another site or disassembled into useful components? How little we care about the disposal of our waste…
Good point Hana. I’m not sure how much was saved – certainly, it didn’t seem much was, though I’d love to know exactly what is/was re-usable in terms of the structure, not just the interior (though on that, that’s a perfectly servicable bookcase being discarded for a start.)
The impact on the environment of temporary buildings was a criticism levelled at Archigram and Price of course – all that ‘disposability’ can reinforce the wrong messages.
Here’s what’s happened to another, higher-profile, temporary architecture scheme in London: the Serpentine Pavillions.