ALEX PULLIN

CARVED SPACE – DESIGN THESIS PRIMER

The Isle of Portland, Dorset

 

 

APOLOGIA 

 

The Island as Territory

 

Using the isolated and desolate island of Flatholm as an initial site in which to immerse myself in the particularities of islands as territories, I gained an understanding of the relationship between the physicality of an island environment and the human reaction to being cut off from wider society. I was quickly able to focus on the unique qualities of the island as a place of retreat and protection, and the potential offered by the island habitat to be a space of shelter and contemplative healing.

 

These unique characteristics of the island environment ultimately led to a design catering for those in need of a refuge from the strains of everyday life. Addiction, often characterised by feelings of isolation and ‘anomie’, leaves addicts as islands within society, and so my design is focused on those in need of rehabilitation from drug and alcohol dependence.

 

The Isle of Portland in Dorset offered an ideal location to explore this thesis. The island, famous for white Portland limestone, is still a working environment – the landscape scarred by the quarries with some still in use but many abandoned. Coombefield Quarry was recently exhausted, leaving an entirely manufactured landscape of bare stone and rubble behind. The scarred nature of this dramatic and evocative landscape enables a focus on the qualities unique to island landscapes. The design is structured along a central axis which reflects the healing process of drug recovery, starting from a very introverted environment of contemplation completely removed from any external influences, before gradually becoming more open in character. A health spa is located in the most public part of the quarry, before the axis reaches the cliffs above the sea which symbolise the end of the treatment process.

 

 

Carved Spaces

 

The ideas of entrenchment and shelter are synonymous with the very nature of the island as a territory, with spaces carved out of solid elements amplifying the characteristics of isolation and separation. On Flatholm Island these spaces are provided within its intricately carved cliff faces of caves, hollows, and crags, while on Portland the entire landscape is scarred by the process of quarrying, leaving behind vast ‘carved’ empty spaces.

 

I found that the excavated voids which are left behind are ultimately what form the character of the space, rather than the solid elements of the rock which instead act to frame the space. This led to an investigation into the qualities of carved spaces through the use of different forms and lighting qualities, enabling the development of spaces of vastly different ambiances. These experiments informed the design of spaces both literally carved out from the sides of the quarry, as well as seemingly having been carved out of the new solid built elements which have been introduced to the site.

 

 

The Natural and the Manmade

 

With carved spaces being the driving force in the creation of architectural spaces, I looked to Land Artists in order to investigate ways of creating a balance between my built architectural interventions, and the existing landscape. Michael Heizer in ‘Double Negative’ deliberately contrasts the natural environment with a thoroughly non-organic cut though the landscape, making a very definite intervention in terms of creating a space out of the void. In César Manrique’s work, a feature is the balance between the natural landscape and human intervention, with parts of his designs remaining entirely natural and untouched while elsewhere his architecture accentuates the unique qualities of the void spaces within which his designs inhabit. Inspired by this, I have contrasted the existing ‘as found’ nature of the quarry with a precise and exact architectural language; both in the instances where I have created a carved space within the solid stone of the quarry perimeter, and where I have constructed solid built elements within the void space of the entire landscape.

 

By looking at architecture as being composed of a series of voids within a solid, rather than as a finished object in its own right, I have been afforded the freedom to develop unique and powerful spaces designed around inhabitation. This process has allowed me to both create a space of healing for the individual, but also has become a way of rehabilitating the manufactured landscape of the Isle of Portland.