GUILD UP
TEAM: Lindsay Harkema, Geoffrey Salvatore, Sasha Topolnytska – United States
Guild-UP! rethinks the former factory as an incubator for modern guilds, or groups of people who collaborate to create new products or services for market. Learning from the history of merchant guilds as a communal living and working experience, this project re-engages these historical traditions in the context of a contemporary society.
The project inhabits the shell of a former factory, representing a bygone era of shared knowledge and craft. Guild-UP! responds to the current trend in architecture of renovating former industrial buildings for contemporary, but unrelated, uses. Rather than retain the building’s industrial history only as an aesthetic, this proposal specifically seeks to draw from the former function of the building as a place of making.
Guild-Up is a space of transformation, for manufacturing and assembling, as well as cultural and social progress through four main interventions: Live/Work, Kitchen, Shed, and Archive. Live/Work enables tenants to live and work in a communal workspace punctuated by “living walls” – thickened partitions composed of shared, yet private living spaces. The Kitchen is a heart of the community. This is where tenants come together to prepare and share their meals as well as their ideas. The Shed is a space where the public is able to interact with the process of innovation happening within the building. After the ideas and interventions are demonstrated at the Shed, the final products are organised in the Archive – a repository for the tangible products of the user-collectives which complete the tenant’s residence.
Through these proposed interventions within the former factory, Guild-UP seeks to revive an era of shared knowledge and craft through a culture of communal living and working.