Tomorrow, Saturday 10 September, marks the start of the 2-day Essex Architecture Weekend presented by Radical Essex.
The festival, themed ‘The Modernist County,’ will pivot around three exciting sites: the Bata Estate in East Tilbury, Frinton-on-Sea and Silver End village. The goal is to illustrate how these experimental community models pioneered Modernist architecture.
This Saturday, 30th April, sees the launch of another event in the Radical Essex programme, ‘Flood House,’ an architectural design project conceived by Matthew Butcher with accompanying events/commissions curated by Jes Fernie in collaboration with Focal Point Gallery.
The structure itself is an investigation into the living conditions of the seasonally flooded landscape it will inhabit, a floating collaboration of art and architecture that is both a projected dwelling for a floating habitat, as well as a labaratory to monitor local environmental conditions.
The exciting commissions to be presented include an artwork by Ruth Ewan entitled ‘All Distinctions Levelled,’ which is a weathervane attached to the ‘Flood House’ itself.
ArtAttack had the chance to speak with both designer, Matthew, and curator, Jes, to get some more insight into this exciting and evocative project.
To launch Focal Point Gallery‘s upcoming series of events and exhibitions, Radical Essex, a project that will re-examine the history of Essex in relation to radicalism in thought, lifestyle, politics and architecture, the gallery presents ‘The Peculiar People.’
The show, which traces the history of ideological and social-political communal living experiments throughout the 20th Century to the present day, opens today, 19th April and features an extensive archival display speculating on alternative living experiments from the late 1800s to the 1980s, alongside visual art, architecture, design and literature that relate to these counter-cultural histories.
To get an inside look into the exhibition, as well as the greater Radical Essex project, ArtAttack spoke with Focal Point Gallery director, Joe Hill.
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