By QMC + PARA-PRAXIS

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Connection to Harringay Warehouse District

Our design is connected to the Harringay Warehouse District by way of being an attempt to reflect the quintessential social and productive relations endemic to the district past, present and future. Please see full proposal outline for further elaboration.

Proposal Outline

Hard Soft Bodies

A metonymic machine and social activator, our design for the Tottenham Pavilion is conceived as an amalgam composed of two opposing tectonic conditions of hard and soft bodies, which function as symbolic forms and actual spatial containers that are loaded with social connotations and possessing certain equivalencies with our own bodies as spatiotemporal constructs existing within socioeconomic milieu.

The Hard Bodies
Sedimentary, stratified, stacked and classified, the hard bodies are both a metaphor for the principle contents found in the warehouses of Harringay Warehouse District; goods neatly stacked in enfilades of storage racks and the specific embodied labour and social relations represented by these objects existing within the regimented space of industrial supply chain. However, in our design, unlike the neatly sorted and stacked goods in packaging boxes ready to be delivered at a moment’s notice, these hard bodies are skewed and disorientated containers that frustrates the rationalizing tendencies of capital and the forces of gentrification.

The Soft Bodies
Diaphanous, blurred, mysterious and transcendental, the soft bodies compressed and exuding forth between the hard bodies, are metaphors for the palpable creative and social energies found and to be amplified in Harringay Warehouse District, which transcend rigid social boundaries and the strictures of corporeality. In the age of digital media, the soft bodies also function both literally as screens for the projection of light and images and also as the ubiquitous projector which mediates our consciousness and anonymous digital presence.

Although the pavilion consists of only a simple stacking of plywood boxes and illuminated pneumatic structures, by forming social containers and replacing industrial produced ‘things’ with a myriad of creative social activities, the design speaks of the very tension and complex dynamism that exist in Harringay Warehouse District.