Remembering Lethaby
Done for School project: Engage
Provoke with Amanda Lester
Pictures taken by Saloni Soni & JT Yean
Groupwork with Saloni Soni 

I chose this project because I thought that this was outside my comfort zone and this was a chance to work in a group, something that I have not done in awhile. I had the liberty with working with Saloni, a sweet study abroad student from India

Overall, it was a roller coaster ride, there were so many times when we had the block but we managed to come up with a variety of ideas. If Saloni didn’t push us, we’ve wouldn’t have come this far. Also we would love to thank Judy Linsday for helping us out as well. We are really excited as this project may actually be utilized in the coming future in an upcoming event.

THE FULL REPORT

So I arrive on the first day of briefing without a teammate and decided to team up with Saloni as she was in my tutor group and I did choose this so that I could do teamwork. We spent ages thinking about what topic or issue to tackle with. We first chose toilet cleanliness but it sort of felt forced and then Saloni suggested the school which I wasn’t sure with. But it made sense, we were leaving and I’m sure we’ve all had some sort of attachment to the building, we’ve all been lost in its complicated architecture and have grown accustomed to it.

So we set out to do our research, I found out from a friend that our school had an archive and so I got the number and proceeded to call Judy. We made an appointment and soon got to meet Judy in person, who was really sweet and nice and showed us pictures and gave us a brief history about the school. Eventually we made more visits to her office trying to get more pictures and information from her. She told us about an upcoming event and that if our ideas are good enough that it might be actually be used in it, so that got us pumped.

We wanted people to experience the building and to get them to really know it before the building disappears. We had a few element to work with, the architecture, the history of the building, the people. We had some visuals as well and we interviewed  students and tutors asking them which part of the building they liked so that we know which places to target.

We eventually came up with a few examples. One was a poster with a hole in it and its supposed to send the message ‘Experience Lethaby before it becomes a mere picture”  and it will be a series of 5 and will be posted up around the building. The second was to print out the old pictures in film so that it would be see-through and make it look like a polaroid. The person would take the piece and stand at a designated angle and compare the old and the new. 

We presented our intentions and our ideas at the first crit and we were pleased that Amanda was pleased with the second idea and went on on building up the idea. We decided that the idea alone wasn’t enough mad made a full fledge campaign with invites but still felt that it wasn’t enough, This went on for days till finally, we came up with the perfect solution. We would archive the whole building and everything in it. I have seen how they have archived maps in my last project and so that really inspired it. We started to design the tags in red as it the colour of Central Saint Martins and it would be eye-catching. Imagine the whole building covered with red tags! Would be quite a sight and it would force people to engage with it. So we went through with the second crit and the tags idea was quite well received. 

We are still working with Judy on the project at the moment. Slow and steady