From Habit to Ritual
Zaina Sweidan
The trigger of this project is food. Food travels months along the North Sea until it arrives to our plate. The way we consume food has change drastically throughout the years by breaking the conventional, communal ritual with a solitary ritual. Food creates the space for celebration, for ceremony, for gathering and becomes an infrastructure for hospitality. The projects aims to use specific spaces to build a different ritual of collective dining.
The garden square, the pub, the tavern, the inn and high streets have been embedded in British culture historically but are not usually thought about when describing privatised public space. The design aims to connect these spaces through two ways. Firstly by connecting the square to its surrounding privatized public spaces (such as pubs, shelters and universities), where the spaces can assist the square with amenities such as toilets, storage space, water, food etc. Each one of these amenities operate at specific times, so my design will highlight the difference in the functioning of the square depending on the time of day or year. Secondly the design proposes tools of ritual that begin in the square and bleed out into the streets of city. These tools include tables, screens and platforms which seem to be floating objects individually but work together to create a system of rituals.
The project looks at designing and orchestrating spaces of ritual from Seven Dials to Euston Square Gardens. This specific site is important as it is heavily populated with students, meaning there is a significant difference in activity between the weekday and weekend. The site also contains open spaces that are historically important , which used to serve the public a space to gather. Either politically for example in the 1840s, Seven Dials was a major gathering area for the Chartists in their campaign for electoral reform. And at the time when this area was considered part of the slums, each of the seven apexes facing the column housed a pub.
The first intervention is removing the rails of the square. For hundreds of years the London square has been the social hub of privileged residential community, a green enclosure reserved for the sole use by the surrounding inhabitants. During War World 2 the railings that enclosed these squares were requisitioned for iron and removed for the production of weaponry and equipment. The newly-accessible green spaces were perceived as a victory for democracy and social progress since they were available to all classes until they were enclosed again in 1944. So my design aims to liberate the square again to the public and directly connect it to the city.