Harry Thomas Day

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.

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  Members enter the club and undergo a number of rituals to depart their original realm and enter the realm of the club, the cloakroom is the main point of transition, disrobing and re-assembling. 

The club has gone through a number of transitions in line with the state of the empire and the development of the Commonwealth, the ideological charge is released through the club’s details.

The realm of the Restored Commonwealth is manipulated by the movement of the Empire Clock.

The hands do not just indicate the time (past / present / future) they also dictate the spaces that occupy the realm at that given moment.

This results in a realm that is in a constant state of flux, jumping time, space and gravity.

The mnemonic details of The Restored Commonwealth Club considers the design of human / non-human interfaces fusing the role of the member and the detail, resulting in the interwoven fabric of the gentlemen’s/non-anthropocentric club.

The Restored Commonwealth Club - film