Yan Liang

For me, the process of reusing an old building is like the process of creating and coordinating relationships. It is not only a new and old relationship, but also past and present, present and future, space and space, space and nature, space and people…the purpose is to create new relationships with all of the visible and invisible things here, thus creating new dialogues.

This is a restoration project in the Clandon building, which is an early 18th-century Grade I listed Palladian mansion in West Clandon, near Guildford in Surrey. The house was badly damaged by fire in April 2015, probably caused by an electrical fault in the basement, leaving it 'essentially a shell'. My project is to create a new library in the old library of Clandon. My purpose is to try and store the memory of this library so that visitors can reclaim time and evoke stories that have happened here, letting people experience the feeling before and after the fire. I created a dialogue journey between two walls, letting dialogue take place between visitors and all of the thresholds in this space, while responding to every traces of library, the Clandon building and even the whole Clandon landscape.