A Boat Called Intolerance

Collaboration with Matt Durran, artist working in glass. Glass supplied by Nulife Glass, Manchester.

A wide-beam narrowboat for a filmmaker; a self-sufficient space designed to be spatially reconfigured for his two children to stay. The boat was to be moored in central London and often left empty and so needed to be ‘fortified’ against intruders, it was to be a defensive space, with a hostile exterior. The response to context is always a starting point when conceptually developing a project, but what if that context continually changes? What if the architecture is restless and mobile?

The combination of mobility and filmmaking, with a need for privacy and a skin of armour, led to the architectural approach. Light is let through a band of reflective ‘teeth’ that, as the boat glides through its surroundings, reads as a strip of celluloid, an ephemeral abstracted animation of its transient locations. This glass band was made of recycled screens of disused televisions and computer monitors. The redundant screens are valued only for their coating of heavy metals, with the glass treated as waste. This was melted down and cast into angled blocks. In the furnace, phosphorescent surface residues became mixed with the glass. At night these embedded phosphorescent materials pick up ambient light, even moonlight, to emit a soft glow. During the day, occasional air bubbles trapped in the blue-grey glass create the sense of being underwater. These heavy blocks have a second role of acting as the stabilizing ballast for the boat.

The interior was lined with oak-faced ply. The plan is a game of moving doors, screens and furniture to maximise a sense of volume and utilize every inch of space. The shower becomes corridor, changing room and bedroom extension; sofas transform into children’s bunk beds, tables and desks emerge and disappear back into walls and an encircling ring of bookshelves creates a floating library.