This occupied bridge project responds to the richness in material culture present across Edinburgh’s Old and New Towns. It offers a facility for the restoration and preservation of archival documents collected from surrounding archives and libraries. As these objects are collected, they drift through the inhabited bridge. The building acts as a filtration device, with its linear, sequential programme allowing for the methodical treatment of these objects until they reach a healed state.
This procession of objects - a drift on display to those walking through the bridge - is coupled with a procession of water. Oversized copper guttering catches rainwater, which threatens to flood the vulnerable site, and moves it down the building and into the landscape, where it can slowly seep into an imagined wetland - an environmental sponge with healing properties of its own. As the copper weathers over time, slowly changing from orange to a minty green, the building becomes a measure of its own physical condition and lived time.
Initiating a dialogue with the public buildings occupying the Gardens, the project incorporates an element of public display within its design. As documents are revived, they are lifted to upper floors, where they live in cases and in low light conditions and invite passersby to examine them. To many, the archive is a somewhat inaccessible - or at least enigmatic - space. You may be able to access documents after requesting them, but the processes of storage, maintenance and categorisation largely remain hidden from the public eye. My proposed occupied bridge aims to challenge this, giving the revival process of documents a highly visible, physical form.
