Following its success, we are proud to present Punk Vernacular, the publication.
Punk Vernacular (PV) is the result of a teaching collaboration between Carl Trenfield and Charles Holland alongside his Masters of Architecture students from the Canterbury School of Art, Architecture and Design, taking the form of a residency within our Unit 5 space, here in Canterbury.
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‘The residency focused on making, with students fabricating 1:1 elements of their projects for new housing in the Kent Downs. Rejecting the stulifying conformity and vapid historicism of almost all new rural housing, we encouraged instead an architecture of rude vitality, bracing eclecticism and spirited invention. Bricolage, collage and surrealism combined with material investigation and stylistic expressiveness. We called it Punk Vernacular, because we wanted an immediacy in the way that we picked up and played with materials and because we wanted to avoid being too polite or overly bound by heritage or conservation concerns. Because, after all, this is how our small towns and villages have been made historically.
The residency also marked a new turn towards thinking through making for me, encouraging both myself and my students to use materials and fabrication more inventively, not as the end product of a process but as a way of re-imagining.
Student work can sometimes feel ephemeral, not because of some innate lightness in its sensibility but because it often fades from view when the academic year ends. And yet there is so much richness, research and insight there that it also needs collecting together and preserving, hence, in part, this catalogue. The work inside includes thirteen individual projects plus essays by Kim Trogal, Catharine Rossi, Carl and myself.
The project was made possible through a research grant from the University for the Creative Arts. Thanks to them and especially to Carl for making it happen.’
The residency and subsequent publication was discussed as part of a recent Artschool talk at UCA, titled Making, Practice and Architecture, jointly delivered by Charles Holland & Carl Trenfield.
