The Home of Storytelling
The Home of Storytelling puts emphasis on social resilience and seeks to make a positive impact on Todmorden by creating a central cultural hub with spaces where locals and visitors can express themselves creatively. It also tries to transform the unused site of the demolished Adamroyd Mill by reinventing it.
The idea behind the Home of Storytelling is founded on Habraken’s theories related to witnessing the built environment as a self-organising entity, and Charles Jencks’ concepts, concerning how architectural style can be read as a building’s language. In this thesis project, the buildings simultaneously become characters of the bigger story and vehicles for telling stories through design, the spaces within them being connected through processions. This new symbolism reinvents the local past, giving purpose to the chosen location. Thus, the project itself becomes a mechanism for creating and recreating stories.
The Home of Storytelling is a complex scheme, including four character groups. Due to this, only the main characters group was further developed. This is composed of three buildings, specifically, the garden and exhibition, theatre, as well as the cultural centre, which present stories through the idea of experience. The site can be entered through several points, but the internal procession takes the visitors through the three characters, ending with the courtyard, where the performance space is found. The masterplan also shows that the overall design arrangement concentrated on the exposed structure. This becomes a frame in which different spaces or layers are inserted, reinforcing the idea that the Home of Storytelling is a vehicle of creating stories itself.
