Harry Solomons

We finally managed to bring everything together for our final presentation today. We showed the following:

• Four items of furniture that we had decorated with clothing in our workshop
• A brochure detailing our workshop process
• A short film showing the workshop taking place

We started by getting to work on our workshop. As we needed feedback sooner rather than later, we decided to perform a rough version while we finalised the materials for it. We crafted example furniture with the second-hand clothes we bought last week, and asked our participants simply to tell stories about their clothes.

When we first arranged our example fabric in a public space, some of the group felt it looked underwhelming, and decided to move towards personalising furniture rather than the space. I disagreed with this, as it felt as though it was moving away from our research on hostile architecture and softening the space, but considering the amount of time remaining it was important to commit to what we felt we were able to finish.

When performing the makeshift workshop, however, people did gravitate towards designing the furniture, and its practical use was immediately obvious when a nearby craft fair asked us to incorporate the designs into their displays, at which point members of the public took to it very quickly.

Finally, we polished our workshop into a more formal, replicable plan, which we distributed with our presentation.

We received the following feedback:

• We relied on the word “cladding” a lot, which has taken on a more political meaning since Grenfell and so carries a different meaning to what we intended
• Our documentation didn’t show the final products in a space – we aim to take more formal portfolio documentation in the next few weeks to illustrate things better
• Overall, we had even underestimated the power that clothing carries as a material of space reclamation, but it definitely had an effect.

I have written reflections on the whole process in a separate post, but as an immediate reaction, I’m incredibly impressed with how much we managed to pull together considering where we were one week before the deadline. Although the project has been difficult at times, I’m proud of how we were each able to showcase our individual strengths to pull together a satisfying answer to an incredibly challenging brief.