Defab

Despite living around the corner, I quite magnificently failed to visit the £60k house ‘Designed for Manufacture’ competition winner outside New London Architecture a couple of months ago. Never went to see the interior; never got any good pictures of it complete (though Rob Annable did that). I grabbed two pictures of it in construction (see the first two below) but that was it. And then it was gone.

I did however document its rapid ‘defabrication’; the destruction and removal of the building from the site. It took one month to build, but was removed remarkably quickly, over the course of a few days – scaffolding erected; exterior cladding removed; interior gutted; dismantling of structure; emptying of small rubbish into bags and with larger parts picked up by trucks. It left a strange void for a few days – we’d just got used to it being there. And now it’s totally forgotten (last image below taken earlier today). The architecture of Cedric Price & Archigram was sometimes intended to come and go just as quickly. And although this was a ‘fake’ insertion of a building as an exhibition piece, rather than an actual home, it was interesting to observe its disappearance. Photo-story below …