Embodied Energies

Elina Zampetakis (Year: 4)

The inner city continuously transforms, every contradicting expression of urbanization results in a denser interiority of exhausted materials. When programmatic or physical death occurs, those materials are eventually discarded and amassed into an entropic landscape. The manipulation of limestone, kaolin, and bone chemical properties became a way to interfere with established and misguided sense of value by working against scientific and poetic material entropy – creating slow resources out of broken bits through the ritual of firing. Scrutinizing Euston’s condition led me to think that architecture in the inner city should only be considered as a process.; that the bond between product and waste is fluid and that “ground” is both a resource and an architecture at any given moment. The project’s argument converges towards the only breach in the HS2 debilitating narrative. The presence of a Victorian cemetery and its 45,000 graves lying right inside HS2’s new ticket hall ties all social, political, and temporal debates. Embodied energies is the process of restoring bones their very particular value, abstracting their form to find them a place within the city of the livings, transforming them into a mundane teacup made in the finest porcelain, Bone China.