SPLIT BY TIME

Location: Margate, UK

Time: 2015.

Category: MA School Work

 

The project is a three-storey townhouse in Margate, a coastal city of UK. Dated from the Victorian era, the existing house is in need of renovation. Nowadays, nobody has an idea of the people who used to be the users of the building, and its old look. However, multilayer wallpapers unintentionally kept a record of the history of rooms, thanks to the wallpapering method in the interior construction, just covering layer upon layer.

The whole stair well becomes an installation art, in which the shuttle of human and light in the spatial dimension is regarded as the linking process of time dimension. The new stair well is designed as a wallpaper gallery, which integrates the new steps into the wall, by the concept that the old wallpaper was curled and fallen off, split by time, and the curly spatial form, so that the steps seem to curl out of the wall. Different steps and storeys are selected to represent the different using phases of the building. The pattern of wallpaper in a certain phase is “recorded” on the steps by means of laser cutting, according to the layers of wallpaper in the various phases. Users will have an experience of passing through different eras of the building, when passing through different stories.