OLIVER BURTON.
INCIDENTS OF AN ARCHITECTURE STUDENT.
 

Extreme Territories. 

June 2014.
 

Extreme territories was an investigation into perfromative study between two bodies of students from England and France respectively.

Students in multitude of courses from both, Arts University Bournemouth, and ESSAB in Brest, northern France, were invited to spend the duration of the week in a dynamic studio environment tasked with creating ambiguous outcomes concerning a particular “extreme territory”.

The collaboration looked to remove the language barrier between the two sets of students through the creative language.  Described as an “intense making/thinking fest’ the week long project was provided with two contexts, La Passarelle, a renowned gallery space within Brest accustom to hosting a varied range of art and music events situated within a converted car garage, and the other a spectacular abandoned hotel peering towards to the coast just a short drive away in the coastal town of Le Conquet.

 

The most important of the two locations takes the form of the abandoned Hotel S’te Barbe.  Perched on a rocky outcrop in the bay of Le Conquet, the hotels setting is stunning regarding the immediate external environment, views out to sea and the rural landscape situate the building prominently and contrast with its architectural surroundings. The state of disrepair cannot be understated, the hotel does not conform to a typical typology and the building accomadtes a series of obscure rooms and spaces once functional and alive. However the building now is almost an open plan structure, with movement through from one room to another often uninhibited by partition walls, the nature of decay within these rooms was inspiring.

Personally the building presented a number of interesting features, the building redundant in function allows for the spaces to be viewed with a certain ambiguity and appreciated for simply their form. The ways in which the building was perceived appealed largely to the atmospherics when looking at a place, the decay and mass of rubble alluded to its previous functions and life within the building in past times.

Stair wells, window openings and lift shafts all removed from function illustrate distinctly architectural qualities, there is a lot to be said of places of disabandonment and as humans our connection to them, and the same can be said of this hotel. It is no better illustrated than with the quote of Tim Edensor ;

 

“For me, however mundane they may seem, ruins still contain the promise of the unexpected. Since the original uses of ruined buildings has passed, there are limitless possibilities for encounters with the weird, with inscrutable legends inscribed on notice boards and signs, and with peculiar things and curious spaces which allow wide scope for imaginative interpretation, unencumbered by the assumptions which weigh heavily and highly on encoded, regulated space.”

 

The ambiguity and imagination Edensor uses to discuss the abandoned are the precise emotions generated by the hotel, an indescribable curiosity and wander about the place.