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Urban Garden Follies 02
London Festival of Architecture 2012
The ‘Urban Garden Follies’ were a series of self-initiated public space installations for the London Festival of Architecture (2010-2013) and Clerkenwell Design Week (2019). The project identified different types of overlooked spaces in London and used key concepts of sustainability as guiding principles for the temporary interventions. The main focus of the ‘Urban Garden Follies’ were questions around sustainability of place, and sustainability through practice.
02 Public Space
Folly 02_Back Yard Garden
Kings Cross 2012‘the UK is in the midst of the largest sell-off of common space. It transpires that the past few decades almost every major redevelopment in London has resulted in the privatisation of public space’
‘Back Garden’ (King’s Cross 2012) and ‘Front Garden’ (Hackney 2013) created impromptu urban green spaces and picnic events through found material and plant saplings. The combination of temporary installations and informal picnic events transformed these places into meeting places for the neighbourhood’s different communities.
The ambition for the ‘Follies’ was to ‘reduce’, ‘reuse’, ‘recycle’ and ‘recover’: timber and building components were sourced from reused and found materials. These were later recycled and turned into public tables or used for bonfire nights to open up dialogue with the local neighbours. All seeds and plants were shared with different participants and found their home in different local households
Project Credits
Curators: Paolo Zaide, Greg Ross
Project Team: Students from Central Saint Martins