The Once and Future Kernow: In Eternal Return
Folklore functions as a cultural repository, preserving collective memory and reinforcing social cohesion through shared narratives. It serves as a medium through which values, histories, and identities are transmitted across generations, fostering a sense of communal belonging.
My building aims to restore sustainable community through the medium of folklore, serving as both a design framework and cultural lens.
This proposal is told allegorically through five Cornish Arthurian tales.
Each tale parallels a distinct phase in the architectural process, blending allegory with design intent. By adopting the narrative structure of Cornish folklore, the project becomes a simultaneous exploration of myth and architecture, and seeks to restore, using the enduring power of myth as a vessel for cultural meaning, a sense of community.
Guided by the concept of the once and future, the building is envisioned not as a fixed monument, but as a cycle: emerging, serving, and returning. Its materials are chosen to decay with dignity. Its form invites ritual, storytelling, and communal memory. Like Arthur sleeping beneath the hill, it waits to rise again: not as a ruin of the past, but as a vessel for continuous renewal.
The building emerges from the earth, serves its purpose, then returns to the soil, mirroring a natural, cyclical lifecycle.
Stories, rituals, and materials are repeated, reawakened, and reimagined, just as Nietzsche’s eternal return suggests: the past is never gone, only awaiting its return.
Its not just a structure, but a mythic cycle; Once and Future Kernow, where ruin and rebirth are one.
In its eternal return, the architecture becomes a living myth, where place, people, and time converge. It is is not just the preservation of heritage, but the forging of a future that knows exactly where it came from.
