Uncommon Building: A Collective Assemblage of a Speculative Building

In the City of Birmingham, UK, in 2017, an organization called Eastside Projects commenced preparatory work on a structure intended to provide prototype spaces for artists to live and work in. Uncommon Building sets out to imagine that structure in the form of a future memory.

Guided by a series of questions designed to invite creative conjecture as to its origins, life, shape, and fate, we collectively assembled a speculative archive of this particular uncommon building, the Artists House, from the perspective of a future time and future place. The initial specifications suggested that the structure was to be ‘light’, ‘medium-term’, ‘bespoke’, and ‘nomadic’.

A workshop in the guise of a consultation session, with specially invited contributors from a range of backgrounds, interests, and disciplines, took place in public and was facilitated by Honor Gavin and Adam Kaasa. The contributions and discussion was observable by gallery visitors. The frictions, commonalities and conflicts of interest of the resulting responses serve – it is hoped – as a productive means towards compiling guidelines for the building as it currently exists, i.e. still to be realized, still to be built.

Contributors include Kelly Large, Rosalie Schweiker, Dr Phil Jones, Alice Gale-Feeny, Thea Radcliffe, Brigit O’Gorman, Craig Ashley, Anna Parker, Simon Dixon and more.