Output details

British Exploratory Land Archive

The British Exploratory Land Archive: Proposal and Prototype, is the first outing of a project intended to catalogue and interrogate the British Landscape. BELA is directly inspired by the Los Angeles-based Centre for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) and aims to unite the efforts of existing bodies from large scale institutions to local trusts and hobby groups, in a project of national landscape taxonomy that will combine catalogues created by these distinct organisations into one omnivorous, searchable archive of human-altered landscapes in Britain. BELA also contributes to the archive with the design and fabrication of prototypical survey instruments and experimental site-identification beacons used for marking, measuring, describing and emphasising landscape sites. These tools are both semi-scientific and speculative, portable and permanently anchored.

RESEARCH CONTENT AND PROCESS

--Description--

The British Exploratory Land Archive (BELA) focuses on architectural field study and instrument design as a kind of expeditionary archival process, researching and documenting unusual and familiar, but overlooked, UK landscapes. It aims to provide an interpretive framework through which to understand and appreciate exceptional cases of land use in the UK. BELA is an ongoing research project, and its first phase applies research techniques derived from the US Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI).

--Questions--

1. How can architectural design tools reinterpret and inform the experience of landscape?

2. How can CLUI land use techniques aid architectural design?

3. How do interdisciplinary architectural approaches add to our understanding of land use, and to land use interpretation?

--Methods--

1. Researching CLUI’s methodologies and aims, including its research archive, field trip approaches and project sites.

2. Identifying a taxonomy of land use, as well as specialist interest stakeholder and hobby groups.

3. Understanding British land use through field trips and site visits, including to the Nottingham cave network and Welsh post-industrial landscapes.

4. Interpreting UK sites through instrument and installation design.

--Dissemination--

Exhibited in group shows at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale (attended by 250,000 people) and RIBA (2013), and in a solo show at the Architectural Association (2013). The exhibit is documented on the British Council’s website and Vimeo, and has been reviewed in Architects’ Journal, DesignBoom, Observer, Crane TV and BLDGBLOG. BELA has been presented in lectures in Venice and London. The BELA website is a searchable database of landscapes and land use, and related resources.

SIGNIFICANCE

Smout Allen, in collaboration with Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG), was one of 10 teams selected by the British Council to exhibit in the British Pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale after an open competition.