Christina Huber

The site, marked by its ambiguous condition, is representative of the contemporary city. It reveals and hides various truths. Essentially a void concealed by the fake facade of a Victorian terraced house, the once inhabited space was excavated to allow the metro line to run between Paddington and Bayswater. Now all that remains is an indispensable metal structure, maintaining the void, as the trains pass below 444 times a day. 

The site. A spatial epitome of the modern obsession of productive ordering. 

A space. Fundamentally removed from the human by a machine integral to todays efficiency. 

A void. Reigned by the linear rhythm of the metro moving from a to b carrying its motionless passengers. 

Aren’t the machines we create always partly monsters? 

Anatomising the strata of urban environment and celebrating its overlooked and derided elements the project underlies the notion of collecting, unprejudiced, the hidden as the apparent: lost spaces, secret rhythms, invisible particles, arcane narratives – giving them creative capital, material importance and unveil their latent aesthetic and sensibility. Interpreting site specificity not as fixed but in flux and renegotiate the balance between chance and design.

The intervention is jointed to the site’s peculiar qualities. The space inserted consists of devices operated by the passing train and enforced by the sites latent narratives. They harvest the site’s inherent by-products and return the space back to the itinerant. 

It is a structure incessantly reconfigured by everyday life. As the sensitive framework is shifted by it’s environment – we are shifted by the space it curates. The role of the designer as we know it is made obsolete. Rather than focusing on the solid aspect of build environment the project sets out to create immaterial spaces in motion, accepting its fundamental instability.

The space inserted is another transient space, subverting the notion of speed and efficiency of the train rushing below. It can be interpreted as an adapter to the machine, that corrects it, warps its function and harvest the efficiency offcuts to turn them into something active and valuable. The machine gives back what it has taken away. A new time-space is established, playing with the distortion of time and the slowness of processes, at the same time questioning the need for acutely stabilised environment and the over-sanitisation of urban space.