Elliot Woolard

Kenwood’s Red Book
2025 (Year 3 - P1) 

Kenwood’s Red Book explored the concept of the ‘picturesque’ in Kenwood Gardens. In the sculpted gardens there is an incessant tension between the natural and the artificial, interpretations of the ‘real’ and the ‘fake’. Inspired by the picturesque landscape designer Humphrey Repton’s Red Books, I aimed to develop my own picturesque process and method of designing that enabled me to design follies to place around Kenwood Gardens. The garden’s ‘Sham Bridge’ was the initial archietctural inspiration for my project. The bridge is a flat cutout, with detail and texture on the front but no bridge behind. It’s role is merely to give the illusion that the lake in front is larger, and the scale of the gardens grander. What would a new architecture designed with these methodologies look like.

The project culminates in a design for an instrument that can place a scale model folly in the landscape and facilitate modifying their position in relation to a prescribed viewpoint (a place holder camera). The modular instrument can also be reconfigured itself to become a scale model of a new folly. Through this constant substituting of the camera and the body the project more thoroughly interrogates the role architecture plays in curating ‘picturesque’ views for seeing inhabitants.

The device/ scale model was manufactured using a wide range of robotic and manual making processes. These include CNC milling, metal-work, welding, braising, laser-cutting, concrete casting and traditional woodworking techniques. The hands-on making process of a modular device (at 1:1 scale) allowed me to gain a better understanding of the junctions and materiality of my proposal. Parallels between the ‘framing of the view’ and the ‘framing of the picture’ are investigated by changing components of the device and the scale model.

REFERENCE: A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Édouard Manet (1882) - Interested in the distorting of the location of the viewer in the mirror reflection.
 
REFERENCE: The Music Lesson by Johannes Vermeer (1665)
REFERENCE: Picture for Women by Jeff Wall (1979)