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Trespass Please   ︎︎︎

Project from 2023 with Harang Seo and Marius Sidaravicius. London, UK.






With the UK industry “preferring a design life” of only 60 years, buildings last anything but forever. As a reaction to the BSI Standards Publication: BS 7543 pertaining to design life of buildings, Trespass Please uses a capitalist, commercial and obscure language to allure developers into using the highly eco-friendly brick. The proposal demonstrates the ecosophy of Arne Næss and ecological humanism by fully degrading in a matter of weeks. All work is thoroughly narrated in the printed newspaper and covers all angles; from the development of the brick made from oats and sugar to the trespassing of an abandoned tube station.






Oat Brick Launch


The Oat Brick was exhibited at Camley Street Nature Reserve, London, as part of a bigger group show Puhpowee! on the 28th of April 2023. Visitors and friends of the Bartlett engaged with the three pull-up banners, 100 Oat Bricks, leaflets and three fake salesmen performing a carefully curated script.





                           Photograps: Yiwen Zhao


  

Cooking bricks


Nailing the recipe for an oat mixture (porridge) that would set in the mold quickly enough for us to mass-produce took several tries. First portions turned into granula and later portions were too ‘fluid’. Also several moulds were produced for a smoother Oat Brick production.












Mold evolution from chronologically left to right



Masterplan


This 1:100 drawing of Camley Street Nature Reserve helped motivate the architectural interventions presented at the exhibition. Although the structures seem random, they were purposely designed to let you enter, dwell and exit the park without using the traditional entrance.






Intervention sketches discovering physical boundaries










Final interventions 1:100 (@240x80cm)


Art of trespassing


This project emerged from the urge to discover what’s on the other side of the fence. Starting out with literal trespassing, making our way into the abandoned tube station at Highgate, we discovered overgrowth and youth culture. We were wondering; where to enter? How do we avoid CCTV? Can we allow others to trespass? Humans, ants, plants? What started out as a literal act of jumping fences into unavailable sites quickly became our philosophical headache.










On a trip to Snowdonia, Wales, we discovered nature in the spirit of Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss and especially his ecosophy Right To Live. Trespassing was no longer the act of jumping fences, but our ecosophical design method. We wanted to make sure that all living species were considered, even if that meant degradation of perceived human superiority (hence the oat brick design, that won’t house humans for long, but plants and insects forever).




Photographs: Iona Mcvean and Marius Sidaravicius

Finally, trespassing the building industry was our last goal. We figured, that to convince a conservative and capitalist industry of our take on ecological beliefs, we needed to adapt their obscure and commercial language.