At the end of June I moved my office into the underground car park of myhotel Brighton to be part of the Threshold pop up event, taking place as part of the LoveArchitecture Festival.
The team, Olli Blair, a:b:i:r architects and Chair of RIBA Sussex Brach, Jim Stephenson, architectural photographer and Paul Nicholson of Chalk Architecture – with Richard Wolfstrome expertly sorting out all our graphics for us – and myself all gave our time for free to make this pop-up architecture built environment centre happen.
Given the space less than a month before opening, it was all hands to the deck for all of us. Against this massive, looming deadline and on a beg and borrow budget, I have not worked with such an inspired, dedicated, professional and fun team. We didn’t create it all ourselves of course – we just provided the platform for a diverse group of architects, artists and built environment commentators to do their thing and thanks go to them for filling up the programme that kept people coming back, day after day.
The myhotel Brighton staff also deserves special thanks for their unwavering support and help during the week – and the generous donation of the space in the first place, without it, Threshold would not have been able to happen.
Not only was it a joy to work on but it also seemed to make an impact with the architects, artists and members of the public that walked down the slope of the hotel car park to come and see us and what we were doing. A mix of interactive installations, exhibitions, talks and debates (and a café and bar) that all sparked though and comment – from the CDMS map of underused space in Brighton, asking people to say what they would do with that space, to Chalk’s to-scale caravan and Yelo’s Paper Haus that both invited people to comment and reflect on our use of space, to the re-use of the car park itself for more creative means than a storage space for cars.
Comments from visitors can be found here, but here are some tasters:
‘Provided a great platform to get the city talking about its potential!’
‘It got a likeminded group of architects talking, long may it remain a thought provoking collective.’
‘…uber-inspiring, contemplations on space and perimeter.’
Worth a read too is the blog written for BDOnline by Olli and the two features in the local paper, The Argus (‘Writing on the Wall for Brighton Architects’and ‘Planner attacked at pop-out [sic] debate’) – we wanted to generate debate locally and it was great to have the support of this publication to spread the word.
Throughout the week we started talking about how to keep this momentum going and ideas are flowing that might go some way to answer the ‘what next?’ question we asked ourselves and had asked of us. Watch this space. Pun intended.
Image by Jim Stephenson, of the Threshold Pecha Kucha event. How does he gets the car park to look so clean and sparkly..?
