CoForum

Shortlisted for the Architectural Journal Small Projects Award, the project comprises 110 bespoke non-identical chairs, fore fronting ambiguity and intimacy in a typological shift (the inverted bandstand) where the center is empty rather than loaded.
As people gather, so the structure disappears, as people gather, so the walls come down. As people gather so transparency increases. CoForum is an enclosure directly responsive to the dynamic civic body, challenging the notion of the public monument. Supported by the Austrian Ministry for Culture and in conjunction with Architecture House Carinthia the project is the second pavilion of chairs, realised as acts of radical craft. The projects are reduced to essential components and constructed locally, adopting materials and craft from the immediate community. The ‘Coforum’ Carinthia joins the ‘Chapel of Many’ borne in Coventry in what is a growing network of ‘assemblages’ specially sited at important junctures of reconciliation and civic empowerment.

Architect Sebastian Hicks has committed to delivering the projects that act as structures for exploratory practice, bringing a platform to local artists and activists. Ambiguity is used as a way to counter the prevalence of the hyper-specific; the ambiguous object is seen as the catalyst for new forms and relations to emerge. The project is uncommon, in that it is not only architecturally experimental but typologically inventive, extending architectural taxonomy, an example of how the architect can be active in generating new forms of public space. Assemblages is a network that will continue to grow, transforming as it comes in to contact with new contexts. For the Co-Forum , Sebastian collaborated locally with Stefan Breuer, in a project supported within the context of post-covid (or covid-resilient) cultural infrastructure. Indeed, the original 'Chapel of Many' was implemented during partial lockdowns, enabling artists to reclaim there place within the cultural landscape. CoForum is a new form of its time.