Unit trip: Rotterdam and Amsterdam. Project site: Liverpool.
This year Unit F will focus its attention on the English terraced house. Tens of thousands lie empty across the north of England, the devastating result of long industrial decline and the chronic failure of the Housing Market Renewal Initiative. We will set out to discover how these derelict buildings can be transformed; how their fabric can be dismantled, reconfigured or re-assembled to create radical new opportunities for the areas and communities they serve.
We will work in Liverpool, in an area called Little Klondyke, home to approximately 450 boarded up houses with not a single resident remaining. Using the re-introduction of production into the area as the starting point for our explorations, the Factory will be brought back to the Terrace. Themes of opportunism and resourcefulness will characterise our approach to the transformation of these abandoned and forgotten structures into new places of work and public life.
Making will be the foundation for our brief and form the core of our methodology. We will explore and test ideas at 1:1, build models large enough to walk inside and learn through doing things with our hands. Together we will build a shared body of knowledge that draws from the refined techniques of craft to the spirit of DIY.
We will experiment and build our ideas first hand and close up but always with their wider context in mind. The resulting projects will be seen as prototypes, demonstrating wider possibilities for the re-use of the tens of thousands of terraces currently lying empty, and questioning the new opportunities for living, working and public life that these buildings could provide.
