There’s no place like home…
V&A Architecture Residents relocate Studio 10 to their new pad in South Ken.
Studio 10 tutors, David Chambers and Kevin Haley of aberrant architecture, currently hold the Architecture Residency at the Victoria & Albert Museum, in London.
Over the course of the V&A residency, aberrant architecture will be researching past and present flexible working practices for their project ‘This is a workplace too’.
The project is already seeing them extract useful and enlightening historical precedents from the extensive V&A and RIBA collections, which are both housed at the museum in South Kensington. For example, they are currently researching the cottage industry of silk weavers that used to populate the Spitalfields area of east London during the 17th and 18th centuries.
At the same time, aberrant are canvassing modern attitudes towards flexible working via their various social networking channels, through their blog on the V&A website, and by way of a questionnaire they are asking visitors to their studio open days to fill out.
Moreover, aberrant architecture’s research project at the V&A is linked to the course that Chambers and Haley are teaching at London Metropolitan University.
The Studio 10 tutors are leading their students in the research of remote working practices and flexible lifestyles in contemporary society, paying particular attention to the hazards and distractions that this newly found freedom might entail.
To this end, the students are studying flexible workers in the London commuter town of Chatham, in Kent, and they have recently visited the Outer Hebrides to learn about the home workers who produce Harris Tweed.
Chambers and Haley have also relocated Studio 10 to the aberrant studio inside the V&A. Their immediate objective is to seal the close ties between the two studios and to encourage the cross-pollination of ideas and research. In the longer term, they envisage the collated Studio 10 and aberrant architecture research feeding into a design, concept or project that will question the future of flexible working.
To give us an idea of the type of end-result we can expect, aberrant architecture have showcased a number of their existing flexible working projects in the lead up to their residency at the V&A.
In October 2009, their ‘Love Stories of Recession’ project featured at the Reflecting Wales 09:09 exhibition in Cardiff, South Wales. Following on from which, aberrant flew to China in December to oversee installation of the ‘Gordon Wu CityLocal’ project at the 2009 Hong Kong/Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale\Architecture.
At the Biennale, aberrant exhibited a trade stand under the ‘Gordon Wu CityLocal’ banner. The trade stand marketed fictional franchise businesses to visitors to the Biennale. Each pre-packaged business was designed to offer idiosyncratic products and services to the rising number of flexible workers in the Chinese city of Shenzhen (the mainland commercial rival to neighbouring Hong Kong).
aberrant conceived the trade stand as an exhibit for their research into flexible working. The conceptual products and services provided by each franchise exemplified the hidden desires and unseen dilemmas facing flexible workers in a major city like Shenzhen.
Like in most cities across the world, the homes and apartments in Shenzhen have not been designed with home working in mind. For the home worker, these residential ‘citadels’ constrict the opportunities for everyday human encounters and make the working week a lonely experience. A Gordon Wu CityLocal franchise serves the city’s lonely home workers by providing the tools to create the office away from the office.
Visitors to the Biennale were given the opportunity to preview three Gordon Wu CityLocal franchises: LunchBook, Wuuf Village, and Tokens of an Office.
LunchBook is a mobile catering concept designed to provide a lunch network for home workers suffering from isolation and a lack of colleague contact.
Users download the LunchBook app onto their smart phones, laptops or home computers, and are instantly connected to a social and business network of flexible workers similarly cut off from the office.
Each day, users can peruse the online menus, pre-order healthy lunch options freshly made using locally sourced ingredients, and send electronic invites to friends, colleagues and other LunchBook users in the area.
At lunchtime, a mobile catering vehicle arrives in the vicinity of popular live-work areas and residential developments to serve lunch and to provide a focal point for remote workers to socialise and to exploit soft networking opportunities formerly unavailable to them.
Wuuf Village offers a subset of products to home workers with pets. A concept for a pet-friendly restaurant allows lonely home workers to share a meal with man’s best friend, and a ‘flirt station’ provides an opportunity for stay-at-home workers to walk their dog and meet similarly reclusive home workers.
Tokens of an Office, the third franchise in the Gordon Wu CityLocal range, is a catalogue of products aimed at recreating specific elements of the office at home. Products in the range include: the ‘Commuter Computer’, a bicycle pedal installed beneath a desk at home, which enables users to cycle to the office without leaving the house; ‘Tech Support’, a bank of telephone operators waiting to provide flirty technical assistance for fabricated computer viruses, and the ‘Random Email Generator’, a computer programme that ensures home workers never miss out on the circular emails doing the rounds of the office.
For the Reflecting Wales 09:09 exhibition in Cardiff, aberrant debuted ‘Love Stories of Recession’, a book of short stories created in collaboration with the writer Falcon B. Mews and the illustrator Rosalind Richards.
The intention of the book was to present aberrant’s flexible working research as a series of stories about five generations of flexible workers. By using a popular medium like the short story, aberrant sought to extend their research and ideas to a wider public audience.
One of the stories, ‘How to Fight Loneliness’, is a comic tale about an out-of-work architect struggling to find a new job and a new girlfriend at the same time as his life in London is trying to beat the recession to rock bottom.
The collaboration between aberrant architecture, Rosalind Richards and Falcon B. Mews is set to continue at the V&A. The research aberrant is currently undertaking into flexible working precedents (such as the silk weavers of Spitalfields) will be turned into a new set of illustrated stories that will bring these historic characters and precedents to life.
Readers can download two short stories taken from Love Stories of Recession at www.aberrantarchitecture.com. Visitors to the public open days at aberrant’s V&A studio can also pick up a hard copy of another story in the series.
The studio open days are listed on the V&A website so why not pop in and see what aberrant get up to in…err…real time. Remember, London Met students get in free!
What’s more, the Reflecting Wales 09:09 exhibition is currently on tour at the Ruthin Craft Centre in North Wales, before it moves on to the National Eisteddfod in Ebbw Vale during the summer of 2010.
But if all that sounds like too much, you can always follow the work aberrant are doing on their website or via their weekly blog on the V&A website.
http://www.vam.ac.uk/things-to-do/blogs/aberrant-architecture/home
