Spaces Buildings Make 2005/8 

Funded by the Art and Humanities Research Council.

This 3-year practice-led research fellowship with two publications from the visual and performing arts at Middlesex University, Cat Hill Campus, which I worked on between 2005/8. It was a three-year AHRC-funded research initiative designed to explore the potential of research methods and methodologies from the visual and performing arts as methods of inquiry in architectural history and spatial culture.

Focused on one scheme – Howell, Killick, Partridge and Amis’ 1973/78 Phase Two building, a replacement for Hornsey College of Art in North London, my research involved working with technicians, staff members and researchers whose methods and practices of inquiry range from sonic arts to graphics, from sculpture to photography and installation across all departments. I sought to use the methods of inquiry around which our individual disciplines have structured the way they approach the development, dissemination and analysis of knowledge and experience to open up the building and its archives to new ways of questioning – perhaps producing for ourselves and our audiences encounter with the building and its histories that were hitherto inaccessible.

Two books were published; first ‘Phase 2’ and then ‘Spaces Buildings Make’ 2008, as part of the research project. The first brought together work produced over the course of a summer practice-led group research exhibition, the second focused on the outcomes of my three-year program including an inflatable re-enactment of a demolished section of the building which later was part of the South Bank summer program at Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre, sponsored by London Biennale 2008.

The building at Cat Hill was closed and demolished in 2011.

Director of Programs: Dr. Aoife Mac Namera.