Francesca Morris

Francesca Morris is an Italian-Australian designer with a background in structural engineering. This combination of engineering and interiors situates her practice between differing facets of the built environment. Her practice explores how we breathe new life into forgotten spaces and the conversations created when historic and contemporary materials converge.

Francesca completed her studies at The University of Queensland, Australia with a Bachelor of Engineering (Honours) and a Bachelor of Commerce (2011 - 2016). She has worked in industry as a structural engineer in both Australia and the United Kingdom on large scale commercial and residential projects. In 2019 Francesca redefined her career by returning to study the Graduate Diploma of Art and Design at the Royal College of Art (2019 - 2020).

Her current Master’s thesis at the RCA is representative of her industry experiences. It interrogates the design life of buildings, questions what is valued during preservation and restoration, and examines how to repurpose materials that are no longer fit for purpose.

Exhibitions & Awards:

2022 Exhibitor at the Royal Academy of Arts | John Hejduk London Masque (Collaboration with Tang Xiao, Yuzheng Zhang, and Zhanwang Zhang)
2021 First Place Project:ff&e Furniture Design Competition (Collaboration with Teresia Guest, Zeina Magazachi, and Luigi Rodrigues)
2021 Exhibitor in the RCA Interior Design Year 1 Window Exhibition at Kvadrat Soft Cells

FOODBANK is centred around the food that we as a society consume; the often overlooked supply chains of produce, the community that is formed through the intergenerational sharing of meals and recipes, and the potential for food waste to be repurposed in the context of the everyday. FOODBANK aims to start a conversation about food waste, building decay, and obsolescence in the context of the built environment.

The initial observation was that the building, in its state of decay, was permeated with small instances of chaotic beauty. The beauty came from the embodied entropic energy that permeated the materials on their descent into disorder and was further aided by the atmospheric conditions of the Suffolk coastal environment.

Entropic energy is conventionally suppressed within the built environment as it calls into question the robustness and reliability of materials. FOODBANK reverses this notion and attempts to spatialise the actions of restoration, preservation, and acceleration of these entropic moments in the site-specific context of the Grade II Heritage Listed Lowestoft Post Office. Lowestoft’s rich history of food production and agriculture influenced these actions as they took cues from the life cycle of organic matter, in particular the food we consume, by adopting methods of food preservation which facilitate or hinder the chaotic beauty.

The separate buildings of the site are brought together by a roofscape that typologically takes cues from the industrial architecture of Lowestoft and functionally embraces the atmospheric conditions of the Suffolk coastal environment to repurpose the entropic energy. At its foundation FOODBANK is a community centre that provides an environment where one can learn about recipes from different cultures, how to repurpose food waste, and how to cook and grow with the seasons.