Urban Drift
During my first visit to the Mayfield site, it was rainy day, but I was intrigued by the place. I felt that the weather and the streets were trying to talk to me, I was walking very slow and always falling behind with the group as I wanted to listen to Mayfield. The following week, I visited Mayfield several times, sometimes listening to music and other times I would enjoy the sound of the site. As a response to the site, I made a resin artwork, expressing part of the unperfected beauty of Mayfield. I showed the art piece to my friend Anna and her response was ‘dérive’. Dérive or in English drifting, is the act of aimlessly walking in an urban context allowing the terrains and encounters to propose the journey for the person.
I grew up in a small city, where the sea front is the main attraction for all the locals, it is 21 kms long and as a kid all we used to do was to walk back and forth for hours on the sea front. This embedded the principles of drifting deep inside me, and despite the difference between the typography of Mayfield and Alexandria, I still felt there is a strong link between the two. Both Mayfield and Alexandria were left abandoned for years and let to grow unchecked, nature claiming them and creating a unique identity.
To acknowledge Mayfield the drifter experience three phases: Recognize, Accept and Embrace. It is illustrated in the images the different intervention proposed for these phases, each drawing is presented in a specific architectural language. Foe each intervention, I drew a section using different choice of colour and style, to express the specific drifting language and its psychological effect it.
Mayfield is imperfectly beautiful and it has built a wonderful unique character through time, thus it would be great shame to demolish this character by ‘cleaning up’ the site, therefore my project aims to embrace Mayfield as it is.
