ADS3: Metabolising the Built Environment
Rachel Housley
Rachel is a London-based designer and researcher, whose work engages in spatial experience, self-sustainability, light and materiality and spans across multiple disciplines from architecture to performance and curation. This year her work has centred around health, body, architecture and landscape, research she aims to continue as these challenges become more urgent than ever.
She completed her Architecture BA at the Canterbury School of Architecture where she was awarded the Purcell Prize for her final project. During her two years as an architectural assistant, she gained experience in residential, interior and commercial projects. Within these workplaces she also partook in a drawing competition that she won, and was a member of the team that won LFA’s competition for the first architecture float at London Pride, which was developed from concept through to construction.
Since joining the RCA, Rachel exhibited her work as part of the Translations exhibition held at Arts Catalyst, which she helped to curate. This summer she will be working in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries’ Back to Earth initiative and the General Ecology project, organising, curating and designing the exhibition alongside a collective of cross-disciplinary architectural researchers from the RCA.
Contact
Instagram: @rachelhousley_
Visit the new RCA Architecture folio website
Create your own folio mixtape
2020 has shed a light on the way that environments restructure under unforeseen circumstances and how designs and modes of living must adapt to accommodate this. Developing my thesis during the pandemic highlighted the urgency of my research and I hope to utilise the skills I have acquired over the year to contribute to the current climate. Whilst my project focuses specifically on the challenges faced by this new era of calcium deficiency, my research spans further than this, questioning how we can learn to live with disease and how our bodies, our landscape and cities shift as substances metabolise in our built environment.
As a result of the pandemic, my original plans to work with a choreographer and performer and film within the quarry were halted. I hope to continue this side of the project at a later date, to develop the notation system further and delve into the possibilities of recording other architectural spaces.
Presentation overview
The rate of rickets has been reported to be the highest in 50 years. Our bones, our bodies and our landscape are losing calcium.
The project looks at calcium, a substance essential for the functioning of all living organisms. Through using a multitude of scales as mapping tools, the project aims to uncover the timeline of calcium metabolism, drawing parallels between calcium formations in the architecture of the cell and the architecture of our built environment. With particular focus on the Victorian era, mid-1900s and current era, the project examines how our relationship with calcium shapes not only the structure of our bodies and bones but our homes, cities and landscape.
Performance is used as a critical tool to rethink architecture and help uncover new strategies for addressing the challenges faced by calcium deficiency. The movements of the cell, the bone and the quarry is directly affected by our relationship with the substance, and performance opens up opportunities to new ways of designing, where environment and movement are symbiotic.
Using this tool as a basis, two notation systems were designed, one for the body and one for the landscape to record the performance of the existing site and opportunities for a new landscape strategy based on calcium rehabilitation. The geological notation refers to elements on the site that contributes to it’s calcium deficiency such as shadow and water, whilst the notation for the body references bones and joints. The visual language represents the spatial and temporal qualities of the site, a written form of architectural space, transcribing the interactions between space, movement and calcium.
Located in Middle Peak Quarry, an abandoned limestone quarry in Derbyshire, three interventions are designed: the Pumping Walkway and Petrifying Well, Rock Prosthesis and Calcite-Sun Bridge. The aim of the interventions is centred around the rehabilitation of the quarry and of the body through the implementation of support structures. These structures are prosthesis of the landscape or body, responding to their condition to support the production of calcium.
Calcium metabolism, health and the urban environment are inextricably linked, and as our relationship with substances such as calcium changes, our environment alters also. A new support system is therefore required for this metabolic era; a system which can and ought to adapt as our relationship with calcium continues to change.
Intervention concept: prosthesis/ support structures
The Pumping Walkway and Petrifying Well
Rock Prosthesis
Calcite-Sun Bridge
Interventions in context
Victorian: Legs with rickets
Calcium metabolism during the Victorian era
Mid-1900s: Legs with normal formation
Calcium metabolism during the mid-1900s
Current: Legs with mild rickets
Calcium metabolism during the current era
The calcium landscape
Quarry section with notation
The landscape is losing calcium
The landscape is losing calcium.
In the Peak District we are seeing massive areas of disrupted land appearing as abandoned wastelands. The site I am focusing on is Middle Peak Quarry, an abandoned limestone quarry in Derbyshire. Whilst these sites have been stripped of their natural resources, the project aims to analyse the calcium potential of the site, depicted in these illustrations using techniques of layering and transparencies used in x rays.
Notation for the Walkway/ crags
Notation for the rocks
Notation for the Bridge/ lagoon
Film still: Notation Symbols
Film Still: Writing the notation on site
Film Still: Performance and the Landscape
Performance of the five scales
The project looks at performance as a critical tool to rethink architecture, and help uncover new strategies for addressing the challenges faced by calcium deficiency. The movements of the cell, the bone, the quarry is directly affected by our relationship with the substance, and performance opens up opportunities to new ways of designing, where environment and movement are symbiotic.
Performance of the five scales
The project focuses on five scales: the cell, the bone, the body, the medical institution and the quarry. The project questions whether we can learn from the performance of the cell's microstructure, particularly the process of remodelling, to understand how we can remodel the post-industrial landscape. The performance of these elements are not understood figuratively, but are ones in which are altered directly in response to our relationship with calcium.