Annabelle Tan Y4
The River, Restoration and Its Rituals Urban hegemony over the rural landscape through privatisation of nature, industrialisation of agriculture and commercialisation of building has resulted in an imbalanced urban-rural continuum. The project sees the river as a valuable trans-rurban commons network that can potentially uplift rural areas while mitigating the impact of urban centres.
Sited along the River Wensum in Norfolk, the building is a roving river restoration machine that visits rural villages to restore the damaged chalk river while engaging and empowering the local community to sustain an intimate, interdependent relationship with the environment through rituals and beliefs.
The river rover is simultaneously a restorative and ritual machine, marrying ecological values with the process of restoration. It floats down the river, initiating different rural communities towards the establishment of a productive River Wensum Commons Collective.
In the context of the climate crisis, the scheme proposes not just a new way of building within the ecosystem but advocates a resilient approach towards community engagement that leaves an impactful non-architectural legacy.
