Eric Turner
RIBA/ARB Part 1
Landscape / fragment model
View towards the Thames - site as an in-situ timeline of changing attitudes to extraction
A Luddite Fallacy proposes an alternative political system and way of living in Grays, Essex, to a backdrop of increasing workplace automation. The project tests generative AI and chance-based workflows, with AI as an inevitable collaborator with the architect of the future.
The proposal is a new city hall for an independent, self-governing Grays, where the local community gains stewardship of the landscape and engages in debate over the construction, conservation and rewilding of the Thames estuary. An empty political testbed is left following the council’s 2022 bankruptcy, allowing a post-scarcity economic system to be established, similar to Aaron Bastani’s concept of Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Situating itself between the Procter & Gamble soap factory and the 13th Century St Clement’s church, the city hall acts as a base point for resistance against further industrialisation, mediating the boundary between production and conservation.
Taking into account the notion of the ‘automated landscape’, where fully automated factories can take on optimised spatial configurations no longer catering for the human body, this surplus space is inhabited and excess material is used in the construction of the city hall.
View film (2m 51s) https://vimeo.com/944277037
Ground / landscape plan. AI generation frames showing speculation and residue
Sectional moments (left to right) debate chamber, courtroom, archive
Model of re-interpreted AI townscape
(Top to bottom) Excerpt of dataset of my own work - AI reconstructions - Tiling AI generations into tangible objects
Y3 Project (2023)
Post-scarcity sinecure is an investigation into class divide and automation in Tilbury. The Amazon LCY2 fulfilment centre, Tilbury Dock and the Tilbury2 port are all sites of advanced workplace automation - the project imagines a post-work future brought about by a full automation of all essential tasks, including devolving local government planning decisions to AI. Two emergent classes are present, the ‘free agent’ and the ‘bullshit worker’, representative of the theories of Aaron Bastani and David Graeber respectively.
Through feedback loops fed by surveillance of the behaviour of these disparate classes, the AI spatialises this (existing) divide, creating logistical highways for automated movement of goods that subdivide the town. Through critical collaboration with AI technology by building around these algorithmically generated fragments, uncomfortable and irrational spaces are rationalised by the human touch.
Drawing speculating on automated border line through Tilbury Video frames
Eye level view into townscape
Materiality - artificial extruded sandstone and steel armature
Winner of second year ‘Community’ project award
Deliverance speculates on a future in which Deliveroo is banned from operating in London due to it’s poor treatment of workers, similar to Uber in 2017. The riders, represented by the IWGB union and still posessing the means to deliver, organise as a worker-owned delivery cooperative and occupy the ‘Deliveroo Editions’ dark kitchen in South Bermondsey.
The proposal retains the existing kitchen (now to be run as a community kitchen), as well as incorporating bike repair facilities, a street-facing space for the IWGB union, emergency accommodation for riders and saunas for relaxation and easing the muscular strain that delivery entails. The whole building is accessible by bicycle, superimposing onto the existing building a network of ramps, gangways and bike racks.
The nurture extends into the city - mapping of deliveries and items identified common waypoints passed by riders, which are the sites of ‘cabby shelters’: small havens within the city with provisions and space for the riders to rest.
Elements of the design language are derived from ‘visual sampling’ - where geometries and forms from the locality that the riders pass every day inform the design, creating an architecture of familiarity while collaging and grafting elements to synthesise new forms.
The Islington Moving Museum is a direct response to Islington council’s archive - where a handful of archivists decide what is and isn’t culturally important, over the whole of the borough.
The proposal is an independent archive that uses digital methods of archival (photogrammetry) and encourages donors to talk about the objects that they are digitally ‘donating’, attaching an oral history to each object that is accessible to all.
Started with an investigation into markets in Nag’s Head, an initial intervention involves moving the outdoor Holloway car boot sale indoors into the Nag’s Head shopping centre, a underutilised and often lifeless space.
The Islington Moving Museum aims to occupy these ‘nothing’ spaces and roams between them, leaving relics of objects archived in their locality in the form of pasted up posters.
Perspective section of museum in transit
Interior rendering of the museum
Flyposting objects and stories around Islington
Drawing of wheatpaste arm mechanism
Isometric visualisation
Shortlisted for RIBA West London first year prize
Creating a platform to protest the invasive development and gentrification of Deptford’s creekside by Bellway Homes.
The proposal is a studio for a vinyl dubplate cutter by the creekside that uses the sounds of Deptford in a live antagonistic sound collage.
Recording devices are placed around Deptford, absorbing sound and transmitting it back to the site where the audio is mixed and played to the residents of the adjacent Mitten House as a commentary on gentrification. Gentrifiers are disconnected from their locality, and constantly subjecting them to the sounds of Deptford breaks down the participatory nature of gentrification.
The ad-hoc architecture of squats, in reference to the squat rave scene, is mixed with an industrial framework to create a proposal that itself is ‘squatting’ in its context.
Composite of physical model and 3D site model
Work in the studio and workshop with CAKE architecture. Designing, fabricating and constructing stages for the first year of RALLY festival, an independent festival in Southwark park, South London.
Over the course of the summer I also produced planning drawings for the Pickle Factory, a club in Hackney, and Thicko, a paragraph 79 house in the Essex countryside.
Isometric wireframe of stage Drawings sent to scaffold team (Top-Bottom) Physical model, prefabrication in workshop, stage construction on site
On site
Isometric construction sequence of the second floor dormer
Technical report on a loft extension in Dalston by CAKE architecture, following and analysing the relationships between architect, contractor and client as well as an investigation into how a project moves from design to realisation. Time was spent on side during multiple site visits talking to the site team and visually surveying progress and technical details.
