The built environment offers resistance and solidity, physical values of mass and volume, weight and load. The building is persistent as an obstacle to our vector of motion, forcing a change in direction, or obscuring our path. While the physical building remains static, its content or programmes are under constant flux. This is most evident in situations of urban regeneration, where spaces are "recovered" and given entirely new programmes. Both of the sites in Kent that this project covers, fit into this category.
The project explores the notion that the buildings themselves might exist in a state of flux, stripped of their physical properties and remaining only as delicate echoes. These spatial echoes can be explored as three dimensional moments in time, devoid of their physical boundaries and constraints. This study offers opportunities to re-imagine the spatial configuration and programmatic relationships across all boundaries. Upon entering these ephemeral spaces, the walls and floors become like a veil, as one moves towards them they recede, immaterial and as insubstantial as mist.
The book describes a series of views into these captured spaces. Some views are taken from positions impossible to access in the real world, which give us glimpses of these sites as never before seen. Other views take on a more diagrammatic and architectural approach, slicing through the buildings and their context, to expose the sectional relationships between the spaces of the building.
The project was realised through the use of a Faro lidar scanner, a device which measures millions of points in three dimensional space using lasers and constructs a colourised point cloud of that space. Many of these individual scan point clouds were stitched together and composited into a single point cloud model.
The Ephemeral space project was developed by JJ Brophy and Christopher Settle at the University for the Creative Arts, Canterbury School of Architecture Digital Futures Lab and supported by the Interreg iV a France (Channel) – England project recreate, co- funded by the European regional development Fund
