Atcost

Drawing Matters' growing ambitions led to a need for more space for its expanding programme for education, away days and occasional performances of opera or drama. We noticed that the vast majority of these activities take place in summer and so we proposed an infrastructural architecture, adjusting an existing barn with the minimum necessary to enable inhabitation. Eager to do as much as we could with as little as possible, we drew a line, allowing the building to remain perpetually unfinished so that it might inspire ad-hoc completion by those who use it.

Clearing out the existing barn we exposed its figurative concrete portals, making a theatrical facade that addressed a larger, unweathered volume. This facade contained a kitchen, circulation, toilets and other services. It also acts to divide the remaining part of the barn into two floors - a lower area for storing models, and a permeable space above which can hold dinners, classes, and can be transformed to act as an exhibition space, or a changing area for productions addressing the larger space.

We used what was to hand, the materials already on site, and skills found in the local town. The building itself presents as something still being formed. Scaffold is used for barriers and handrails, and a bricolage of materials found in the yard to make its enclosure. Trusting the conversation with the site to provide the solution in each case, the design was a case of contrast, refinement and editing, a paring back to what was essential.

As the effects of Covid begin to wain, we await its iterative transformation.