Retrospective Futures 1

Above: Sheep were used in the imagery of the motorway service station as a metaphor of the collective madness of a society so utterly hooked on mobility and burning carbon.

Preface

I realised that a good many of my degree and diploma level projects had plenty of future thinking into the issues surrounding sustainability and the built environment. I thought the material was worthy of dusting off, digitising and celebrating as a series of retrospective future thinking posts for the Sustainababble blog. This project from 1988 looked forward to the demise of fossil fuel burning motor vehicle culture.

Above: 1:500 scale model of the final project for a motorway service station

Motorway Service Station, Kent, 1988

Our second-year tutor at the Canterbury College of Art’s Architecture School, Charles Neale dreamt-up an intriguing brief for our main project of the year. The Channel Tunnel was under construction and Charles reckoned there was a need for a motorway service station to act as something of a gateway for travellers entering or re-entering the United Kingdom. In a way, this was a celebration of motorcar culture but almost immediately I started to struggle with what my approach to the brief should be. A breakthrough came when I hit on the idea that the facility should be conceived as a rusting hulk of motor-culture; a disintegrating machine stranded in a Kentish field. For me it became an epitaph to a by-gone age, an age, which was to me, so clearly out of balance with the sustaining capacity of the Earth.

For me the motorway service station had to become an epitaph to the by-gone age of the fossil fuel burning motor vehicle, an age, which was to me, so clearly out of balance with the sustaining capacity of the Earth and what we woud later collectively associate with the culture of ‘peak oil’.

Above: Above: The Motorway Service Station was conceived as a working facility, it’s just that its external architectural handling came loaded with connotations of decay whilst a transient installation (fuelling consumer greed) occupied the interior.