Student Work: Year 2: Retail/Exhibition Design (Adaptive Reuse)

Project Title: Rebuilding Heritage Crafts One Market Hall at a Time

Year: 2024

Scanning the Heritage Crafts Association’s Endangered and Critically Endangered list, gave rise to the motivation to preserve the most vulnerable craftspeople. This design converts Norwich’s Bank Plain Market Hall into more than a place to shop but also a place where local trades such as tinsmithing, coppersmithing (objects), fabric pleating, bicycle frame making, spectacle making, and umbrella making (currently practised in Norfolk) could display their craft to a receptive audience thereby proving their value and reigniting support for preserving them.

Each space has two rooms, the back room will be used as the workshop and the front room will be the retail space. Visitors can feel free to engage with the maker as he/she works and would be available for questions. Muslin curtains like those used in set design dyed soft colours given structure through steel rods mimicking an umbrella and operated via tensile fibers connected to a mechanised system will hover above each space replacing a roof and add an element of drama by revealing the spaces and/or covering the spaces as necessary.

Materials: Polycarbonate, Muslin, Steel