Augmented Huddersfield : 2021/22

Conditions of digital / physical hybridity increasingly permeate our urban experience making it possible to speculate upon a world of dual occupancy. This projects takes a position in 2050 where technological developments such as 3D printing and virtual / augmented reality representations have become ubiquitous within everyday life to the degree the smart phone has today.

This project interesects the town of Huddersfield with this condition. The physical attributes of historic built environments within towns and cities offer a sense of inflexibility with conservation laws often pinning entire zones to support an artificially defined character ( conservation areas).

However this distanced position between inhabitants and built heritage could be said to be define by a one-way digital cataloguing of space in greater and greater detail ; its history, forms and details are recorded down to the millimeter to ensure any further decay does not occur. The inclusion of wide spread virtual representations and real-time 3D printing techniques allows the 2050's populace of Huddersfield to form and reform their environment at will, without the paralysing fear of loss which we find ourselves within today.

This reciprocity between physical and digital realms opens up a new form of agency within town centres where people can discuss and negotiate its form in a palimpsest of appearance and erasure.

Hyper-Parliament : 2018 /19

In many respects towns and cities are living entities with a continuously evolving landscape. Cited as historic objects many of them pass down only small aspects of their historic epochs. They are in a constant state of appearance and disapearance akin to the surface of a palimpsest with echoes and traces being passed down through various forms.

These drawings attempt to trace the evolving landscape of Huddersfield by accounting for not only physical buildings but uncovered urban typographies and nomanclature which point to a rich past. The Visible and the Hidden.

On the surface Huddersfield is noted as containing fine Victorian architecture and later post-war disruptive urban interventions, however yards, folds and even medieval street forms point to a far older origin. These elements have held a significant influence upon the town's development and its extant urban form.

Palimpsest Huddersfield : 2021 /22

Against the backdrop of the ever-increasing proliferation of digital media, the project charts new relationships between the city and meta-verse. Our technologies are influencing how we navigate and consume urban environments, leading to arising phenomena of digital augmentation and representation; the former points to the optimised and operationalised digital cartography which we employ as a mode of navigating the functional zones of the city, whilst the endless snow-balling and cataloguing of events through social technologies creates a pre-ordained, mediated understanding of our environment.

Hyper-parliament traces this condition through a speculative analysis of 'iconic' architecture in Birmingham, posing a theory of disjunction between the hyper-controlled interior and the out-of-control façade, exacerbated by our bifurcated digital interactions. Drawing on the theories of Jean Baudrillard and modified deconstructivist methodologies, exemplified by Bernard Tschumi, the project proposes a relocation of the Palace of Westminster to Birmingham.

Such a relocation also opened up questioning regarding the nature of the parliamentary events and rituals, embodied within the Palace of Westminster. The proposal draws upon this rich tradition, inheriting the idiosyncrasies of the building as central to our notion of government and the relinquishing of power.