Purfleet Film House accommodates large film productions and is situated within a river edgeland called Purfleet-On-Thames. My proposed design is to transform the abandoned edgeland into a lively area with heavy and light structures that emphasize on living materials. Studio 3.3’s main collective thesis is to ‘Go Large’ by proposing a river edgeland film production site that is set within a flood responsive landscape infrastructure. My design philosophy attempts to reuse what is already on site and work with natural materials to rejuvenate the essence of the Thames estuary. Some of the natural materials include timber, earth blocks, algae salt tiles and oyster shell waste
Making architecture on soft and hard landscapes challenged my proposal’s vision for Purfleet-On-Thames. It situates within submerged forests juxtaposing large scaled infrastructure. Through this project, I was able to investigate an array of bio-materials in an attempt to start building with nature and extrude that into a large scale. Looking at materials, I began to investigate the existing materials on site in order to build with what is there. I started to think about how the things I build could degrade and not leave as much of an impact.
This design project and research on Purfleet-On-Thames allowed me to question the harmful extraction of materials such as steel, which is typical in large scale building construction sites and to begin to challenge these concepts using bottom-up design methods that I can make by hand.