Architecture

My speculative design practice is shaped by limitation, slowness and bodily negotiation. Working from within a disabled body, I approach design not as an act of mastery or resolution, but as a process of assembling, gathering fragments, offcuts, memories, and observations into provisional structures. I am interested in what emerges when conventional tools, timelines and methods are unavailable or refused.

Unable, at times, to access machinery or sustain prolonged physical labour, I work tactically. I collect what remains: discarded materials, small components, things already marked by use. I sand, repair, repaint and re-scale them, restoring a sense of value through attention rather than precision. These fragments become architectural suggestions rather than declarations, readable as a wall, a step, a threshold, a railing, a room, a pause. At different scales they shift meaning, slipping between object and environment, furniture and building, model and memory.

Bernard Tschumi writes in Architecture and Disjunction that “there is no space without event.” I understand space as something activated through bodily encounter, through fatigue, rest, repetition and orientation. My work asks how architecture might accommodate bodies that move slowly, horizontally, intermittently, or unpredictably, and what kinds of forms such bodies produce in return.

My process begins with spending time on site. I attend to histories, edges, patterns of use and neglect, noticing how access is shaped by material decisions and unspoken rules. These observations are translated into drawings, collages, photographs and diagrams, ways of thinking through the site without fixing it. I move between scales, from the territorial to the tactile, allowing details to reframe the whole.

Physical models become a central thinking tool. Working at 1:200, 1:100, 1:20, I assemble structures slowly, layering and unlayering elements, repositioning and reorientating them repeatedly. I move around the model constantly, standing, crouching, leaning in close, testing how it feels from different bodily positions. Forms accumulate unevenly. Some spaces remain open, unresolved; others become dense, interior, compressed. I do not decide in advance what constitutes a room, or whether a space needs to be enclosed at all.

These models operate as landscapes rather than buildings, growing outward rather than upward, accepting gaps, overlaps and follies at their edges. Use is imagined but not prescribed. I am interested in leaving space for interpretation, misreading and future occupation.

Once a model reaches a moment of temporary coherence, I document it extensively. Photographs from above and at eye level are traced carefully, translating tactile imperfections into plans, sections and elevations. The act of drawing becomes another form of excavation, preserving uncertainty while fixing scale. Details are developed through the same bricolage logic, placing elements in proximity and allowing the spaces between them to speak.

Rose Macaulay writes in The Pleasure of Ruins that “the beauty of ruins lies in their openness, to weather, to time, to transformation.” I am drawn to incomplete architectures because they resist closure. My practice embraces erosion, contingency and softness, proposing speculative environments that acknowledge impermanence and bodily difference.

What emerges is not a finished architecture, but an assemblage: a set of propositions, fragments and invitations. A practice of working with what is available, what is worn, what is unresolved or purposefully incomplete.