Joe Singleton

Photo of CRT screen with corridor on and contact images on the left

Joe is a research-led Architectural Designer based in the UK, his practice is centred on the intersections of how different people see the world and each other, on spatialising conviviality. His work reflects on the connections between people and how they are mediated, his practice then is focused on this mediation and how this can be translated into architectural form.

He graduated from Kent School of Architecture and Planning with a BA in Architecture in 2019 and worked for 2 years at an international practiced based out of Torquay, Devon before joining the MA Architecture programme at the Royal College of Art in 2021. He is currently involved in various teaching and design collaborations across London.

The archive acts, as architecture does, to construct a view, to construct an understanding of human interactions in and with space and time. It acts to position its viewer as superior, it acts to position its user as a holder of its authority, to centre the body within its world view. It acts to situate the spectator in a constructed and homogenous reality, in a space that is calculable, navigable, and predictable, in a fabricated linear reality.

This architecture is designed to challenge this function of archives, to engage with the many ways of seeing found within each and every image, it is designed through these ways of seeing as a way to inhabit these spatial interactions. It is designed to engage with the imageries and imaginaries contained within this collection of moments. It is 36 rooms that are designed through the gaze found within a collection of 36 images, each acts to change the archive from something to be spectated to something to be experienced.

This architecture is a space that critiques how archives function and distort reality through their sole lens’. Through creating spaces that allow us to inhabit the ways of seeing found in every image a new understanding of archive is established which allows us to approach these repositories of dust and data through their interactions with space and imagining ways of being beyond the image.

This architecture, this intervention, therefore, is both a space and a methodology; it is a process to subject archives to as a way of uncovering hidden socialites, hidden forms of life, hidden ways of being. It is a process that produces a new architecture of archive, of documentation of life, a dis-archive that is an assemblage of ways of being.

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These films, renders, blurs, plans, and textures are all constructed from the ways of seeing found within the collection of 36 images that were selected from the archive. Each spatialises these gazes, these perspectives and invites new ways of seeing, new ways of experiencing the interactions contained within these images. These rooms are an architecture that invites speculation and imagination, they invites us to think about what we extract from archives differently and to create an intimacy with the images rather than distance. These are all acting to express a different methodology of archive, a methodology of relations and close looking, of refusing definitive logics and embracing the archive as generative.

The 5 grids below relate to each other, they are different ways of seeing the same space, the same spatial interaction contained within the image from the archive.

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Film

These plans describe the ways in which we could move through these spaces that have been generated through the archive, each offers a different route, a different way of moving. This is to deconstruct the logic of one way of looking that is embedded within archival methods and to present all ways of moving through this body of data as valid.

Medium:

Digital Images

archives moving-image routes ways-of-moving

These films describe the different iterations of the project from research through to first forms of design within the project, they act to describe different ways of interpreting the archive and the long process of looking that led to the 36 rooms.

Medium:

Digital Images

The project has used installation as a medium throughout its development, the positioning of images in relation to each other in space and creating experiences that would allow you to step into the ideas being discussed in the work has been central to the work. These images are some of the instances of these conditions.

Joe Singleton

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Social

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Royal College of Art