The New Bedford Agora
5th Year Masters Project, 2014
Bartlett School of Architecture
Tutors: Matthew Butcher, Elizabeth Dow, Jonathan Hill
Sited in Stewartby on the lower Oxford Clay belt, the Bedford Cooperative Brickworks proposes the democratic model city of New Bedford. The city implements a participatory form of governance and a cooperative form of living where citizens are unified to meet their common economic, social and cultural needs through the jointly owned and democratically controlled enterprise of the brickworks.
The New Bedford Agora is a local parliament for a participatory democracy, proposing a new democratic architecture that encourages public participation within democratic activities whilst questioning existing spatial practices of government. The project proposes a smaller democratic unit of local government where its 12,000 citizens are able to gather and participate in the annual public forum which replaces local government elections and provides an opportunity for citizens to physically participate in decision making processes.
The building adopts the collective spatial condition of the field; creating new participatory spaces that are open to appropriation and adaptation by their inhabitants. Democratic, civic and domestic activities are played out within the heterogeneous space, open to exposure and encounter by inhabitants while reducing formal barriers between its members and citizens. Specific democratic activities such as council meetings and committee meetings are reconfigured through the collective spatial condition, with particular moments physically manifest through articulations of the brickwork.
The ruinous and seemingly incomplete quality of the architecture allows the mind greater opportunities for speculation. Forms are not necessarily prescribed; rather occupants bring a use to the space. When not in use, objects such as the speaker’s chairs and ceremonial routes lay as dormant ruins, suggestive of their potential for occupation.
