Through the Feminist Lens
GROUP POJECT
A group project between 5 of us in the PraXXis atelier. As part of the brief we had to come up with a practice name, ours was FUN which stood for Feminist Urban Nature. Within this we came with a practice manifesto, describing what we stood for. We took a playful approach to how we communicated through our portfolio. Understanding that architecture can be exclusive and we wanted to remove the stigma around that. For this project we had to archive something and re-use the Pankhurst centre. Given that the Pankhurst centre is a grade II listed building and has historical significance we had to be mindful and respectful of the existing building and everything that is protected by the grade II listing. As a group we chose to archive the untold feminist stories of women in science and technology. For example Shirley Ann Jackson who invented the caller ID, improving the security of communication. As part of the project we designed a feminist approved document specific to our project design. Showing in detail how our specific feminist technologies are inclusive to our users.
FEMINIST RECYCLED BRICK PROCESS
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As one of our feminist technologies designed a sustainable brick more suited for women. We made the size of the brick more suitable for the average woman’s hand which are scientifically and typically smaller than the average man’s. The size of the brick is a similar size to an iPhone 6 S.
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The materiality of the brick is made from a protein called Casein which is extracted from mammal milk and is a wasted bi-product of butter and cream and when extracted it hardens into a biodegradable plastic.
We coloured it using natural dyes from raspberries and put non-recyclable plastics into the brick that would normally end up in the ocean. The brick is also coated with bees wax to make it waterproof.
The mould used for the brick was made out of an old recycled drawer, keeping the process of the brick making as sustainable as possible.
