Terracotta & Faience Factory

  • Marina Gardiner

RIBA Part II - Year 1 - Design for a Terracotta & Faience Factory The proposal is for a cross-programmed facility aimed at cultivating and disseminating a culture of making and the cross-fertilisation of ideas and techniques. It explores the relationship between a ceramics manufacturer in Vauxhall & luxury apartments clad with those ceramics, engaging with the opportunity for making something in Vauxhall to feed the global city, interfacing and in dialogue with the encroaching giant of Nine Elms. The global city has a lust for handmade, a new ceramics factory taps into this market for luxury apartments clad with ceramics, coupling commercial with artisanal scale production. The factory supplies the global city with terracotta and faience, whilst the small-scale craftspeople who weave their way throughout the rest of the building engage in smaller scale production, providing one-off wares to furnish the same apartments.