The peripheries of place and people illuminate spaces and identity in Forget Me Not, a study by Victor Williams Salmeron of University of Kent
Bronze Medal Winner
Victor Williams Salmeron for Forget Me Not
University of Kent
Tutor: Victoria Lourenço
Forget Me Not is an exploration of decay but perhaps also the beauty of ageing gracefully and the part that plays in place and identity. A meditation on buildings of care and the people in them – in this case former carers – throws up a rejoinder to the non-places of sterile airports and hospitals identified by writer/philosopher Marc Augé.
The site might be considered a non-place itself, sitting between Chatham and Rochester in Kent and on the edge of both, a place of meeting peripheries. ‘Historically edges have been the place of outcasts,’ explains Victor Williams Salmeron. Here there were many smaller communities and no defining style. But on the ruins of a Victorian chapel and a car park he proposes an almshouse.
It is materially rich, taking in the ruins it is built on, making a patchwork collage of materials from abandoned warehouses, now demolished, much in brick. ‘Brick embraces decay well, it already has the irregularity and unexpectedness of dirt,’ says Williams Salmeron.
The plan reinterprets and is reminiscent of a hospital – the non-place familiar to former carers who the almshouse is for.
An intensely considered roofscape sees high rooflights draw in daylight at different times of the day in each home – giving each a sense of individuality. The rain, too, has its own paths drawn out for it across the homes, collecting, channelling, weathering. The interior walls are conceived as another treasure trove of experiences, with the tops of the white walls retaining the marks of previous inhabitants, that build into a poetry of references.
Hidden away in plan, yet ever present as the tallest building on the site, an archive rises, a grander architectural gesture, and a way of honouring memory by storing artefacts of residents’ lives in a visual way, in niches in the cast limecrete wall. ‘It is a kind of sacred space, says Williams Salmeron. ‘It is the idea that architecture is much more than an edifice, it is about the people who live in it.’
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Bronze Medal panel
Elena Marco (Chair) Professor of teaching and learning of architecture and built environment, pro vice-chancellor, and head of the College of Arts, Technology and Environment at the University of the West of England (UK)
Simon Chadwick Director at StateStudio; senior university teacher and deputy head of the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield (UK)
Jamie Fobert Founding director at Jamie Fobert Architects (UK)
Kudzai Matsvai Architectural designer and educator (UK)
Betty Ng Founding director at COLLECTIVE, and adjunct associate professor of architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong)
Oana Stănescu Founding director at Oana Stănescu Studio (USA and Romania)