ABOUT

Marjorie Kennedy is a London-based Urban, Architectural (Interior/Exterior) and Furniture Designer with previous experience in Paris, Barcelona, Dublin, NYC, Stockholm, Edinburgh & Glasgow. She is at the outset of creating her first publication using her design research interest of the relationship between the home and the heritage of the setting.

Marjorie has worked in private practice and undertaken several volunteer roles in architecture. Her interests include teaching architecture and one-to-one portfolio advancement for school leavers. 

The main research of her architecture is the home and its access to spaces of inspiration, be that in the urban or rural environment, and be that private residence or housing design. She views the interior architecture of a home as akin to a sacred, spatial portrait where the life of the resident is described through objects, framed by the architectural envelope, and at place in the heritage of the setting. 

 Brought up in a poorly designed, single-use social housing context, Marjorie's has lived and worked in 7 international cities to gain primary urban design, masterplanning, housing and residence design research. Her aim is to use this research to inspire ethical, and cultural habitat design where it is most critical. Not only by sustaining practical and environmental solutions but by inspiring urban and rural spaces to be filled with joy and delight. 

The project is set in a future hyperdense city. The purpose of the choreography of the city pace project is to allow each quarter of the city to be evacuated with ease in case of a natural disaster, conflict or fire emergency; or allow choreographed open space adequate to serve the population during a pandemic. This is done by the use of people capacity kinespheres which align the scale of the architectural space, the landscape space, the transportation space and the infrastructure space of each quarter. Each quarter demise line is a kind of people density contour.

The type of transportation system of each quarter is choreographed in Pace to allow for static, slow, medium, fast, superfast movement within the overall city. The overall Pace is calculated by the use of a people density methodology. This is the  modular which acts as a generator for the quarter’s urban form. 

While the materiality of the architecture is read as fence and wall

markers in the landscape the materiality has a second layer of

symbolism. The tradition of the blackhouse as an island architectural typology, informs the symbolic  material references of the configuration and construction of the architecture of the proposal. The timber, vertical fence building also reads as symbolic of the timber structure underlying the thatched roof of the blackhouse while the stone, horizontal wall building also reads as symbolic of the stone base of the blackhouse. Together they read as an unravelled blackhouse. Unlike a traditional blackhouse the proposal’s roof and wall are separated and unravelled to form independent buildings to describe their independent configuration and construction, and intertwined in places to form communal spaces. The space between the two tectonic construction systems of the wall and fence buildings marks out the territory of a working courtyard.

(All line drawings are pencil on parchment hand drawings)

The Manuscript House is a retractable defence home. The architecture is formed by the following structures:

The Chorus Wall/Walkway

The Cantilevered Verse Rooms

The Dis-chord Staircases (retractable in the evening)

The Base Cantilever Weights

It is a cantilevered, retractable defence home located in an undisclosed location in Scotland and inhabited by a Choreographer and her family.

(All images are pen & ink hand drawn)

Research of the Halo motifs of the Raphael Cartoons and the design of the Scottish chairs on display at the Victoria & Albert Museum was undertaken to inform the design of the 'Halo' chair furniture collection.