'Oh, you mean the fireplace site?'

The Nicholas street/St. Peter's Street site is known locally as 'the fireplace site' due to the discovery in the late 1990s of a Medieval fireplace high up in one of the walls (pictured above). The traditional practice of history has ascribed value to that artifact, and many of the people we spoke to regarding the site mentioned that the, to them, the rest of the remains are of 'no historical significance'. We take umbrage to this phrase as we feel that there can be no one, definitive 'history', and so it is not possible to ascribe more value to one artifact than to another. There are several other fireplaces extant within the wall, which led us to develop our thinking regarding the rituals of domesticity, and will perhaps form part of any scheme(s) we produce.

Staircase: importance of ritual in domestic setting

"For all that passes, passes by the stairs, and all that comes, comes by the stairs: letters, announcements of births, marriages, and deaths, furniture brought in or taken out by removers, the doctor called in an emergency, the traveller returning from a long voyage."
Life A User's Manual, Georges Perec

Ideas about ritual in domesticity are borne out in the staircase. TAKA use the memory of the staircase as a conceptual driver, the staircase is seen as a room in it's own right.



The staircase plays an integral part in how we might begin to think about the intersection between the domestic and the common room space as it oscillates between public and what can essentially be considered private.