The Event Markers Club

Title: The Event Markers Club

Author: Holly Barker

Year: 2014

Abstract: Like many post-industrial towns, the Lancashire town of Blackburn has suffered significant decline; many shops lie empty and the community suffers from a lack of social mobility. However, Blackburn’s demographic speaks of a more enterprising future, a high youth population, thriving college and a diverse community.

The thesis develops upon an understanding that place is made by people over time. Partnering through the year with council arts initiative ‘Blackburn is Open’, the project combines untold narratives from creative site surveys with local knowledge gained from participatory workshops conducted during the Live Project, ‘[re]create Blackburn’.

Previous planning decisions have resulted in a disconnected town, separated into two halves by a dual carriageway. An urban strategy, the ‘Cultural Corridor’, is proposed, creating a pedestrianised spine connecting
the predominately Muslim residential streets to the north of the road to the cultural facilities and college to the south.

Within this wider strategy a building is proposed on liminal space next to the dual carriageway acting as an integral component of the Cultural Corridor. The Event Makers Club converses with the proposed Islamic
Educational Centre on the adjacent site, forming a courtyard between these two buildings. The programme is a modern interpretation of the town’s heritage in performance, providing spaces for amateur performers, college
students and the public. A permeable facade enables the surface of the cultural corridor to cross the building threshold and wind through the plan, creating an urban route through the building.

Internally, where a physically moving screen, door or material change announces a threshold, a liminal space is designed to allow for chance moments of interaction between the different users of the building. Decoration is used to adorn the thresholds, echoing the filagree on the museum and town hall, yet is woven of stricter geometry’s influenced by Islamic architectures.