You need to know the cuts, edges and shapes of your shards to understand how they could work together, in some form of wholeness.
The renovation of A4 Arts Foundation following a neighbourhood fire offered opportunities to revisit the Ground Floor and the Foyer, where proto the store at A4 resides. We were invited to reimagine the foyer space, expanding its temporal and spatial potential as a site of engagement.⠀⠀
The concept model was built with cardboard, tape and glue, to simply and quickly work through ideas and iterate variations on the theme.
We borrow the language of the garden to think through a new spatiality for the foyer. Gardens are places for wandering and discovery; moving amongst tall trees, brushing against foliage and flowers. proto’s new store exhibits fragments and offcuts of artworks along tree-like formations of shelves. A garden also offers moments of pause, sitting on the earth under a canopy of trees. A large communal table becomes a central spatial object around which people gather, share and talk.
Sennefer’s Garden in Egypt, 1410 BC – 1829 AC. In the depicted garden, a courtyard shaded with vines occupies a central position, directing visitors from the main entrance to the villa. The building is surrounded by a lush garden with rows of trees with shallow pools inhabited by ducks and lotus blossoms. A high clay wall encloses the garden, the villa accessed by boat from the river. Originally a fresco painted on the walls of Tomb of the Vines near Luxor in Egypt, it survives as a copy made in the 19th century by Ippolito Rosellini.
A wall-hanging timber shelving system by James Mudge was adapted into freestanding spatial objects to move through and around.
Prototyping happened on site with the help of artist and fabricator, Kyle Morland. We first used additional pieces of timber for support, and later developed the design of a steel frame suspending the shelves between floor and ceiling.
Team: Meghan Ho-Tong, proto, A4Arts Foundation, Hamzeh Alfarahneh, Josh Ginsberg, Kyle Morland
Year: 2021