2086 Narrative
'Anti-Frequency' imagines a dystopian Britain in the year 2086, diseased by an Orwellian government under extreme dictatorial control. In a digital, post-work society where futility is imposed on everyone from birth, all forms of recreational music and entertainment have been outlawed and criminalised. By 2086, an entire cohort of 40-year-olds have lived without ever hearing a song before. This major shift in daily life has given way to a band of rebels – The Refusers – whose goal is to take back of control of happiness, recreation, and reintroduce the arts of sound and music back into the country. I set out to achieve this goal with an ambitious adaptive re-use strategy within the Lace Market Car Park.
Spatial Concept
From the beginning, I set out to design a museum-adjacent civic building containing an educational, experiential journey – one that ends in both the individual self-actualisation of connecting with music, and symbolic release of the culture surrounding it. Inspired by the architecture of museums and concert halls, I transformed the space into an open and informed building, characterised by a vast, ominous structure called ‘The Void’: a growing and angular intervention that at the bottom of which music swells and booms upwards - only to be fully unleashed at the exhibition’s pinnacle. I took design languages from the appearance, behaviour and theories of sound to promote vertical movement, and implemented numerous floor cut-outs to constantly bring the user towards and away from 'The Void'.
