The Courtyard Project
05 May 2010
Architecture display at The Manchester Museum until 30 May
Have a look at the shortlisted designs for a temporary structure in the Museum’s courtyard, by students from the Manchester School of Architecture.
The Courtyard Project
29 March-30 May 2010
Animal Life 1 gallery, The Manchester Museum
Free entry
The Courtyard Project is a collaborative project involving The Manchester Museum and 5th Year Architecture students from the Re_Map and Prototype studio units at Manchester School of Architecture.
A competition invited the students to design an environment within the Courtyard space outside The Manchester Museum's entrance to align with the summer programme and exhibitions. A shortlist of five proposals were selected and developed further, a summary of which you can see on display at the Museum.
The Museum has selected Reflective Room to be taken forward and the project will be constructed in the Courtyard in June 2010. The student design team from the Prototype unit is led by Matthew Mills and will be assisted by unit tutors Nick Tyson and Ming Chung, along with Neil Thomas of Atelier One.
The Reflective Room will be fabricated and assembled by all students involved in the project in collaboration with technical assistance from Manchester Metropolitan University, The University of Manchester and The Manchester Museum.
Reflective Room - Design Team statement
The Team are inspired by the changes that unfold in the Courtyard over the course of the day; by people passing, ambling and drifting through almost unaware of their surroundings. The aim is to utilise the ordinary to create the sublime.
A room is to be fabricated within which people can re-engage with the Courtyard and as well as the space itself, to sit and relax, contemplate and reflect. The concept aims to revive an awareness of the environment by taking an off-the-shelf product in the form of a standard black glazed ceramic tile and to harness its material qualities.
The replicable nature of the tile component is explored within a plywood skin and structure to create an experiential space. The inherent qualities of the standard tile are offset by the subtle and delicately distorted reflective surface when viewed against the contrasting untreated plywood carcass.
By enclosing the public space within a room, the Courtyard is revealed in a less direct way and is presented to the observer as an abstraction of the surroundings. Edges, materials, weather and the surrounding environment are made apparent through subtle reflections, reducing the large scale to an accessible human scale.
The Manchester School of Architecture was formed in 1996, as an innovative collaboration between Manchester Metropolitan University and The University of Manchester.
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