You might be forgiven to think that KSCA is all about farming and land and nothing else, but its just not true. The Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation is structured to allow its members to explore cultural adaptation and change wherever it can be found in the world. Potentially this can be anywhere that social and/or material change compels the need to adapt culture to it. For KSCA artist Sarah Breen Lovett, this happens to be the original community hall of Kandos, in regional NSW, around which she has developed a project exploring the ability for architectural practice to participate in the regeneration of the post industrial town. This ambitious, long term project will convert Angus Hall into WAYOUT, an art facility that will provide space to Cementa Contemporary Art Festival, local community and regional artists to reimagine Kandos after the closure of its industries. This project has attracted the partnership of the Future Building Initiative at Monash University and the interest of internationally renowned architect Momoyo Kaijima of Atelier Bow Wow.
Last June, Momoyo visited Kandos to deliver a co-design workshop that involved Atelier Bow-Wow, artists from KSCA and local community members to consider the potential of the building to serve its artistic and local community. Momoyo led the group through a series of exercises that played on its diverse strengths and needs. In line with Cementa’s own premise of making art that addresses both the arts community and the community of Kandos, WAYOUT will want to find a way of accommodating these two very different cultures in a single space. If possible, this should be done in a way that brings these two worlds into contact with one another in order to permit conversation between them.
Momoyo approached this complex task through activities that called upon the various elements that are at play within the project. We started with the broadest range of potentials, found commonalities and finally moved toward a focused set of architectural ideas. This approach would help to translate the concerns of the artists present and those of the community into ideas of the built form.
The workshop began with a whole group discussion situating our discussion within a framework of main themes, before moving onto the really interesting bit, or Mōsō. Mōsō is a japanese term that roughly translates into English as Delusion. Participants were encouraged to dispense with any concern for the reality principle of the project and to dream up designs that ignored the constraints of material or structural reality, cost, building code, or any other practical concerns that usually serve as the foundation for such projects. The result was an array of designs that revealed four common themes: a landmark for the town, connection to outdoors, new communal spaces and flexible exhibition spaces.
These four themes were then unpacked in terms of potential benefit to the town and community. The idea of creating a landmark, for instance, is integral to the motivation of the project, creating a destination venue that will draw visitors into the town and create ongoing economic benefit. The connection to the outdoors was drawn out through the common understanding that the building is situated in a stunning landscape, in a small town on the side of a mountain that rises above it on one side and elevates it on the other, yielding stunning views of the wide valley around it. The last two themes combined in discussion to comprise an art facility as communal meeting space, collapsing the boundary between these two potential uses by two discrete communities in order to generate relationships between them.
It was a fascinating process and discussion. As you might suspect, it is still early days, and like all things KSCA, we are engaging this project as an open process through which we discover strategies and methods through engagement with the social reality in which we practice. With such an ambitious project, it looks like we have quite an adventure to look forward to.
