Antepavilion announces two winners

AnteChamber by Nima Sardar of StudioN. Image: Architects’ Journal

Antepavilion has named two winners for its fifth edition: Nima Sardar of studioN and Morgan Trowland of Extinction Rebellion.

The competition invited artists, architects, designers and makers to design temporary, relocatable hanging interventions at the Hoxton Docks complex on the Regent’s Canal.

Sardar was declared the competition's overall winner with the collapsible AnteChamber camera-obscura. The design is inspired by a Victorian fairground, with competition organisers saying that it “will resonate with the Hackney planners’ concept of harmony with heritage architecture, as they apply it to the 1900s to 1960s wharf buildings now adorned with references to a rich range of historic eras. If not, it collapses nicely for transportation and safe custody.”

Sardar's structure will be constructed later this year using salvaged timbers from Maich Swift Architects’ dismantled Potemkin Theatre, which won the 2019 commission.

Entrants to the competition were briefed to create a bartizan, an overhanging wall-mounted turret. The brief was selected following Antepavilion's ongoing legal battle with Hackney Council, which forced the removal of last year’s winning scheme – Jaimie Shorten's set of fibreglass sharks – two months after it was installed.

“This background was fundamental to the ‘Bartizan’ brief and the criteria that the jury had to apply to select a winner,” wrote the competition's organisers. “The selected structures would be required to be expressly temporary, mobile or transportable, or otherwise not caught by prohibitive planning constraints that the council would be quick to adopt into their legal arsenal.”

Writing about his design, Sardar said: “Instead of a defensive structure, the proposal is more a temporary habitation space for resting, like a birdbox – which is the inspiration for the project, a bird’s nest being a true form of architecture. Much like a bird’s nest, the space provides a sanctuary – an overhanging addition to an existing structure but the use is completely different. The top of the structure acts as the pin hole of a camera obscura, projecting the sky on a viewing table below. In isolation and seclusion, occupiers can focus on the changing image of the sky to help them calm down from daily stresses.”

The competition jury also selected an additional winner: Trowland's All Along the Watch Tower. A tensegrity tower, All Along the Watch Tower follows up on a similar tower that Trowland co-designed with Julian Maynard Smith for the Extinction Rebellion protests outside News International’s Broxbourne printworks in September.

Trowland's design will be built as a “parallel, early-summer, temporary installation”, say the event's organisers.

Trowland wrote: “Our bartizans of tensegrity bamboo towers, or “beacons” as we lovingly call them, were born out of a need to speak truth to power and challenge the mainstream discourse about the climate and ecological emergency we are facing. We used our beacons to physically occupy a space and disrupt the status quo – forcing our demand to be seen and heard. This pavilion is an evolution of our beacons. The beacons embody the characteristics necessary in guerrilla-style confrontation with authority: agility, flexibility, adaptability, transportability, and security. They are instruments of non-violent direct action in the face of encroaching authoritarianism.”

Story source: Architects' Journal