Output details

Barking Town Square, London

Barking Town Centre is part of the Mayor’s 100 public spaces programme. The public realm design makes a coherent new space for the town square where the town hall, library,a faculty of the University of East London, the one-stop-shop, a child and primary health care centre, approximately 500 new homes, retail, cafes, and a major public art commission, all come together.

The public art element provides the fourth elevation to the wall, conceived and developed and implemented by muf, this 7 metre high folly recreates a fragment of the imaginary lost past of Barking.

The project involved a number of diverse groups in its detail design, this included students from the Theatre School, elders from the Afro-Carribean lunch club and apprentices from the local bricklayers college.

More information at http://www.muf.co.uk/portfolio/barking-town-square-2

The pavilion hosted local preoccupations which in turn were a means to reflect on similar issues from the UK. The centre piece was Stadium of Close Looking, a 1:10 timber model of the Olympic Stadium repurposed as a drawing studio flanked by two explorations of fragile ecologies Venetian collaborators - a pairing of a record of the neighbourhood that surrounds the Giardini with pages from Ruskin’s notebooks and a fragment of live salt marsh fed by lagoon water. Each had their own post-Biennale afterlife, the salt marsh relocated by the entrance to the Giardini and the timber fragment of stadium ready to be moved for public use.

“Villa Frankenstein shifts our perception of Venice as a historic backdrop to the Biennale, to one of a dynamic participant. muf has introduced many new collaborators to the British Pavilion including the schools of Venice, the scientific community, community activists, historians and artists. By emphasising the importance of close looking and observation, which takes many different forms, muf demonstrates an alternative approach to architecture based understanding what we already have.”

More information at: http://www.muf.co.uk/portfolio/venice

Katherine Clarke is the artistic half of the muf practice.