‘Garden Cocoon Space’

The ‘Garden Cocoon Space’ for Southwark Cathedral’s herb garden is an art-installation which encloses objects that will facilitate discussion of the experience of memory. For me it will be a return to childhood when the garden shed housed a wind-up record player and in the distinctive smell of wood and sunshine I shared special children's conversations. This memory prequels the ‘Cocoon’ which will be a safe enclosure excluding the surrounding busy city.
The ‘Cocoon’ will visually focus the centre of its tiny sunken garden and indeed its whole visible surroundings. It will be the only example of an otherwise completely unrepresented type of practical building, both in structural method and intentions: a primitively personal hand-built architecture.
Seen in its surrounding city context - improvised from branches and twigs and enclosing experiences of memory - it will uniquely differ from its whole location, saturated as that is with a multitude of structural types both mobile and static, symbolic and technical, vast like the Shard and minute as the details of old walls, objects of pure engineering and historicist essays like the cathedral's east-face ... an environment that displays nothing resembling this fascinatingly 'out-of-place' hand-crafted refuge.