Marie Matheron

The dominance and intricacy of the tower block aesthetic on the environment around where I live in east London has become a focus within my work. When walking around them, I have observed these isolated monoliths and the strong impact that they have the visual and physical rhythm of the city landscape. I observe these patterns as fabric.

Developing an analytical approach, I have established visual and conceptual connections between a specific group of these structures. Created on a central modular grid, the architect conceived ‘variable’ elements, altering specific details (lines) to create ‘difference’ within the same system. 

Inspired by the modular concepts of the 1950s by architects such as Le Corbusier, these structures embrace the post-war modernist approach to architectural design and social housing. They were designed in such a way that the structures could be rotated, mirrored and grouped in different ways allowing a pre-desiged multiplicity of forms and relationships.

I am interested in the relationship between grids and pattern. How from the same grid we can create a multiplicity of outcomes. From explorations around the tower bloc and through the following projects my research asks how we can change and challenge the idea of ‘immutability’, of a ‘fixed’ state of structure, pattern and movement.