zoë chamberlain
Home: The Threshold
With Louise Watson
Door and Balcony Glass Designs for seven developments across Cambridge and a community engagement project
Cambridge City Council Affordable Housing Framework in partnership with Keepmoat Homes
Incorporating a different design for each development across the city for both the social and open market housing, the project was funded through section 106 "To benefit local communities and enhance a sense of place”. There are three interconnected parts of the project.
Part 1 Home: The Threshold
I worked with Glass Artist Louise Watson to create bespoke glass balconies and door glass, the 'Threshold' of each property within each of seven of the developments. Each development site has its own distinct design devised with young people from the neighbourhood.
Symbolic talismans have often been used to mark a threshold, to ward off bad spirits or show status. People often decorate their threshold to represent their individuality. The student designers from secondary schools in each neigbourhood were asked to look up and create their own symbols to represent the notion of Home for use within the designs for the threshold glass.
The symbolic motifs are layered within the double glazed units with maps of the local neighbourhood relevant to each site. The resulting artwork marks the threshold between private and public space.
Part 2 Home: Worlds Within
To celebrate the work produced in the local communities, I have also been working with local young people to generate their own artwork for an exhibition at the Museum of Cambridge as part of the Curating Cambridge Festival coordinated by the University of Cambridge.
Find out more about the Worlds Within exhibition here
Part 3 Thesholds Neighbourhood trails
To further explore the notion of Thresholds and to encourage new residents to explore their community, a puzzle trail for each neighbourhood has also been devised in partnership with Discovery Games. We devised three distinct treasure trails relating to the local areas around each development. Distributed to the wider community and to each new resident, the trail creates a context to encourage people across their 'Threshold', to explore their neighbourhood.
Follow the trails here
