Matter of the Manor: material assemblages

Buildings decay and mutate; they are made of hybrid assemblages of material sourced from near and far as Tim Edensor states they are “…emergent mosaics of various temporalities, collages of matter characterised by an incessant becoming”. New materialist thinking supports a shift away from a reading of historic buildings as objects analogous to documents inscribed with fixed histories to one where space, time, materials and people are intertwined in an unfolding process.

Wymering manor, a 16th Century house in Cosham is currently undergoing restoration by a community trust. Until 2006 the manor functioned as a youth hostel, but it is now obsolete and faces an uncertain future which depends on the efforts of the voluntary community that now own it. There is currently no planned programme in place for its restoration and reuse, which would otherwise implement a unifying design and conservation scheme aimed at achieving a fixed end point, a completion of the project. The house provides a space of cultural and historical ‘affect’ in the middle of a suburban setting where local people are invited to engage through volunteering or as an audience member to one of its varied events.  

LiDAR scans of Wymering document the house and its artefacts as a way of engaging with everyday relations in space. The scenes that emerge from the scans blur the edges between precise cloud point data – scientific information – and the entanglement of the everyday – between fact and fiction. They allow the free flow of the imagination and an unfolding response to our embodied experiences – they create movement –affective assemblages of materials, space and time. The work examines alternative forms of representation for interior design practice through the use of ortho-slices and everyday domestic objects.