My thesis question is “How To Transform An Institution With A Savage History To Serve Its Present People?”
My selected site is comprised of former Shrewsbury Prison and its adjacency. “Transformation of An Institution” is a generator to produce a project of “wellbeing” through a narrative of starting from people and ending for people. To immediate the “conflict” between absent inmates and present citizens is introduced via a systematic loop.
1) Notion of ‘Wall’, a critical comparison among Monastery, Lunatic Asylum, and Panopticon, was elaborated by pealing the layer of ‘physical wall’ for understanding ‘psychological wall’ inside;
2) “Urban renewal”, in terms of “Neighborhood Park”, “From functional unity To Functional Diversity”, and “Axis Of ‘Wellbeing’”, has demonstrated how to brand a town by enhancing strengths and transforming weaknesses for better opportunities in the future;
3) “Architectural Redemption” is to impose juxtaposition between the old and the new. Grade II Listed Buildings are retained for memory and educational purpose, and new barrel vault complex is to provide opportunities and “view”. A diagonal cut through former male cells at A Wing is to bridge the two directions of the axis, as well as a cardinal intervention to reveal savage history for present people to confront and forgive the negative history.
“Quintillian says, ‘when we return to a place after a considerable absence, we do not merely recognize the place itself, but remember things that we did there,’ it is possible to use this property of places to construct a kind of memory machine.”
-Anthony Vidler, “The architectural uncanny: essays in the modern unhomely”
