Prepared for the Antepavilion charity /Architectural Foundation’s annual design competition, this year seeking ideas for a floating installation on a series of ex-military pontoons. 

Message in a Bottle sought to create a community workspace shaped like a giant floating wine bottle.  Alas, a sight too often seen in our canals and waterways as discarded rubbish: a key part of our message was to highlight  the need to clean and enhance our waterway heritage as a strong green resource for our inner cities.

Reacting to a design theme of ‘bringing the community together’ the concept revolved around forming a space where people could meet and do something creative: in this case to build model boats using re-cycled materials.  The boats could then be launched from the neck of the bottle into the canal: turning on its head the traditional notion of building a ship in a bottle from the outside in.  Our floating bottle was carefully sized to sit over and mask the pontoons to further the illusion of a giant bottle just bobbing about on the water.

01   /   2020