The New Local
The New Local is the long term project to mark London College of Fashion’s move to its new location in Stratford in 2023. The project started in 2015 with research into how members of staff at LCF interacted with the buildings they inhabited, in order to create something that commemorates the six campuses LCF occupied until the move. Through the research we discovered many ways to talk about the legacy of a building, from personal feelings about specific elements of the workplace to site specific sentiments as well as a more general sense of relationship people had with their place of work.
Talking to the employees was the first port of call, and it soon became clear that what makes a place of work something more than a impersonal and utility focused domain is the personal touches people make and project towards the environment themselves, which create a sense of familiarity and belonging.Some of these are very personal and specific while there are numerous instances the type of interventions people make is shared among many. It seems these observations and actions people take, kind of if-you-know-you-know references, can make us feel included and involved in a workspace. The project’s main focus then became finding, cataloguing and reflecting on the different types of familiarities we feel towards a place through experience. It was a fitting idea for a brand new building which, by definition, is unfamiliar and strange for everyone who will be inside. During the research phase, the findings were presented as a series of publications. Each publication centred around a theme that derived from talking to members of staff and catalogued various elements of the buildings of LCF. The publication series took the forms of printed matter that correspond to the theme at hand such as postcards, a poster, a zine and a guide book. These different yet recognisable formats were meant to offer different lenses to see the familiar buildings and environments. The publications finally lead to a set of nine interventions within the new building. They aim to touch on the history of the previous campuses and bring familiarity into otherwise new and foreign environment for the college’s employees. The interactions with staff, the publication and other things found through the course of the project informed the interventions that are permanently installed in the new building. Some of them are intended to feel incidental and informal while others blend into the environment, but the common thread running through them all is that they are there to bring back some aspects or sentiments we have with places from the past, whether its a remnant of an architectural detail, office plants or accidental scattering of buttons on the floor, and hopefully they will contribute to the process of making the new building a home for the people who use it everyday.
Commissioned by London College of Fashion | UAL