By Sabrina Morreale and Lorenzo Perri(Lemonot)
VIEW DESIGN VISUALS>>
Connection to Harringay Warehouse District
Warehousing’s roots go back to the creation of granaries to store, to preserve and to provide nourishment when little was available. The value of the Harringay Warehouse district lies in this great power of sharing, of continuous survival in times that change quickly.
We visited these studios and living spaces, which are intertwined with each other as their people, sharing not only material space but also emotional space.
We propose a communal urban table because we wanted to deploy the process of collective negotiations that characterize the daily realm of the warehouse community in the public space.
Proposal Outline
As soon as you enter each warehouse, the first glance is in amazement, curiosity but also confusion. We are not used to seeing so many levels, mezzanine, bicycle corners, things accumulated on the ceiling and modules that can be changed overnight. We wanted to transfer the heart of the warehouse, where every tenant finds themselves at the kitchen and the table in the living room, these were already spaces where everyone met.
The desire to envision unconventional and heterogeneous forms of collectiveness is the starting point of our proposed pavilion.
Love 19 is an open loggia that offers shade and shelter – but also a long table to be climbed, with 19 seats located at a considerable distance to question the usual proportions of conviviality (quite contemporary in these times of social distancing), yet close enough to discuss, to share and perhaps to argue. A place to start a conversation over lunch, but also to organize future projects and to host workshops under its curtains.
Tables are shared spaces of encounter, at the heart of every meeting place they form a plane for conversation and interaction. Love19 unites all of us in an ‘urban sitting room’, creating a suspended domestic moment within the public space of Harringay.
Constructed of 19 inhabitable columns that support a light vaulted 15x5m horizontal surface and standing at an impressive 3m high. This long table offers as well unusual perspectives of everyday life on the Seven sisters Road.
Becoming a first point of contact with this community, a portal to the streets that will take you down to the warehouses, to the heart of the neighbourhood. It allows the public to linger together and to watch the spectacle of those who pass by, sunbathing or chatting with their feet hanging on Eade road.
Love19 is a sculptural performative device: we invite users to share and to stare. The hollow columns – hybrids between fan vaults and metallic raised umpires chairs – encourage people to move through it. Hosting events or workshops around it. Underneath the table the gallery forms a floating corridor where each column corresponds to a place to sit.
Climbing up the movable stairs coloured in Wimbledon Green, we invite the community to participate on a common ground. The table can be dismantled, the 19 mobile pieces of furniture can be relocated along the pavement, becoming standalone meeting points. The modularity of the design allows for multiple configurations and to be scaled down or up.
It is an architecture to be appropriated, to be used and shared. There are no umpires or formalities here, just unexpected conversations.
Add a seat at the table.