Anna Russell

My work is focused on the social, cultural and political impact of architecture, examining the role architecture plays in facilitating or inhibiting the way we live and our right to the city, particularly the relationship between gender and the built environment. Last year my project (ADS1) entitled ‘Airing your dirty laundry’ (which was awarded the RIBA London Student Award) challenged the fragmentation of domestic space, and the privatisation of domestic labour, by re-imagining historic communal practices of labour in the public realm.

Throughout my practice, I have explored these concepts through drawing, model-making, textiles and film.

I graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2018, and worked at Carmody Groarke in London during my Part 1.

‘Quilt city’ seeks to critique and challenge the ways in which public space, and more broadly the city, is produced, appropriated, adapted and maintained over time.

The project proposes a quilted urban strategy, deploying intimacy, collective, care and time, to allow for an unhindered use of urban space to “live in, play in, work in, represent, characterize and occupy” (Fenster, 2005) during our everyday lives, where citizens actively participate in the decision making surrounding the production and maintenance of said urban space. The project asks whether through a continuous undoing and redoing, the city can be designed to be resilient and “recover from forces or pressures which occur in time” (Sennett, 2018:287).

Medium:

Film

Size:

3:57min

A Collective Making – 'A Collective Making' pieces together, like a quilt, images of own quilts, my observations within London’s public squares and the community quilting groups, building up the visual narrative to form a patchwork of documentation. Critically, the film draws similarities between the collective life of the squares with the collective making in the quilting groups, by depicting the activities in both at the same scale.

Collective making

The process of quilt-making has often been seen as women’s work, a ‘craft’ that is made in the confines of the domestic sphere and relegated to an inferior position in relation to men’s art. However, quilting, which has evolved through heterogenous histories and cultural traditions around the world, can also be described as an art of safekeeping, protection, beauty, community, and protest. Quilting is a collective making process; it involves bringing people together within the same space, and parts of the quilt made individually, are joined together and collectively sewn either side of the wadding to form a quilt. The final quilt becomes greater than the sum of the individual pieces of fabric. Throughout history, communities who are often excluded from traditional forms of discourse and protest, have often turned to the collective intimacies of quilting in moments of need, as a method through which to express themselves. As such, the making of quilts is collective, reparative, provocative, and subversive.

A collection of London Squares

Quilting a collective square

A Collective Square – front

A Collective Square – back

The public square will become the site of quilting experimentation. As a space that is typically free of built structures, it allows for numerous possibilities and imaginations. At a small, intimate scale, the quilting of the public square will allow local communities, stakeholders and councils who are directly affected by, or experience these sites to be involved in the decision making around a particular square.

Public squares also represent a place that everyone has a right to, - a place for the coming together of people: a stage for public discourse, and protest, or the place for intimate encounters and contemplation - however, in some public squares these rights are often restricted.

Over the years, but increasing at concerning rates today, Acts of Parliament restrict how we appropriate or conceive of public space. These laws restrict how we design and appropriate public space; where, how and if we can protest; they increase surveillance and police stop and search powers; they allow for the privatisation of streets and public spaces, they attempt to criminalise the livelihood of homeless or traveller communities, which all act to remove our freedoms and our right to the city.

The use of the public square to test the quilting of the city, therefore, seeks to subvert these obstructions.

Undo and redo – [Design, construction and appropriation of Windrush Square Stage 1]

Windrush Square site plan, Stage 1

Undo and redo – [Design, construction and appropriation of Windrush Square Stage 5]

Windrush Square site plan, Stage 5

Undo and redo – [Design, construction and appropriation of Windrush Square Stage 8]

Windrush Square site plan, Stage 8

The concept of time is critical to quilt-making and craft. The making-process – what is learned or discovered during this activity – is just as important as the finished object. It allows time for ‘reflection’ and ‘imagination’, as the makers are constantly engaged in both problem-solving and problem-finding as she or he “uncovers new territory” (Sennett, 2008).

This is evidenced in the redesigning of Windrush Square, Brixton. The proposal pieces together and stitches the existing and historic squares that once stood on this site, reusing materials from the site and the surrounding area to create a new centre, grounded in memory and care.

As the square changes overtime, the continuous interplay between problem-solving and problem-finding is upheld. The square will be treated as a place of endless making, testing, imagining, and reflecting, to enable the citizens and stakeholders the possibility of undoing and redoing the square, adapting, and responding to changes or issues that arise over time: the square, and city at large, are not fixed, stationary entities. As the plaster cast illustrates, there are number possibilities to

Possibilities of Windrush – [Plaster cast]

Possibilities of Windrush – [Plaster cast detail]

Whose streets? Our streets. – [Parliament Square Plaster cast and fabric quilt]

Whose streets? Our streets. – [Parliament Square Plaster cast and fabric quilt detail]

Anna Russell

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Royal College of Art