Based in London, John is an architectural designer who approaches the production of space and objects through a fluid practice between making, drawing and film.
While he focusses his personal research on addressing problematic attitudes towards work, value and prestige in the built environment; he is keen to use design, regardless of format, to provoke new, critical means of perceiving and interacting with our surroundings. A recent master’s graduate of the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL; his work has been shown at numerous exhibitions and screenings in the UK and internationally, including the Royal Academy. Eager to reach across disciplines, he enjoys working both independently and as an idealistic, future-minded and pragmatic collaborator.
For more information, including questions about previous work, current ideas, or potential future commissions, please get in touch.
E: hello@johncruwys.com
Portfolio Film
2018
With special thanks to:
Schedule
The project is seeded through a ceremonial placement of a model to site – on object that initiates specific ritual acts, which are built up and developed each year, with no set end in mind. This process is intended as a vehicle to provide clear provenance, communal involvement, and spiritual attachment in a context of precarious work and labour, growing into a slowly enacted festival practice through building.
Near the beginning of the project, the site enters gradual motion. Fragments are delivered to site using existing power station infrastructure, utilising and extending existing rail networks. Construction on site is centred around providing spaces to fulfil this ritual action each year, starting off ad-hoc and experimental, they become increasingly programmed, and resolved into two clear civic bodies, as well as open public space around it in flux.
Development
As the scale of the project was quite extensive, a visual and material language was tested through models of building fragments. Here, a ceramic maquette studies areas within and around a council chamber.
Loose schematic models were also developed in tandem. Here the arrangement of the Town Hall is considered, yet even at this larger scale, ideas around materiality are not forgotten (e.g. earth-cast circulation cores – poured excavated and erected in situ).
Town Hall & Festival Hall
Significantly, the project coincides with the deconstruction of the heart of the town, Rugeley Power Station, and ultimately occupies the same site.
The buildings seek to retain the presence of the power station and negotiates between the scale of the surrounding village vernacular, and the magnitude of the power station. To achieve this, the building adopts the distinctive sweeping geometry of the cooling towers in two key aspects. Belonging to the Town Hall (left), the bell tower reflects a full height 110m slice out of a cooling tower shell. While within the festival hall (right), the void of an inverted cooling tower is dug out and retained to create the concert chamber itself.
Models
Final 1:100 scale models of selected areas within the scheme (a council chamber, the lobby area, interventions within the garden, and the bell tower) are presented in detail, yet also act as physical props which are later stitched together and digitally inhabited through film.
All Projects
Information
John Cruwys
Rugeley in Resilience
Models
T.H. & F.H.
Schedule
Development
Overview
Film