Memory Laundrette is a project which seeks to develop an approach to the design of critical vectors within the built environment. With a particular focus on interiors in urban settings, it employs genius loci to create platforms from which to explore the potential of non-linear approaches to the creation of artefacts. These complex and layered objects serve in turn as conduits for broader discussion on the role of design in the shaping of urban space, incorporating the enduring impact of the layered legacies of (in particular) utopian modernism and offering potential future alternatives. By introducing a type of dematerialised making into the post facto production of, in this instance, utilitarian objects, the inquiry looks at how design fictions and telematic-crafting might be used as threshold crossing devices oscillating between memory, craft, design and production with the ambition to create speculative props as a part of the intangible heritage that, for now, is the performed aspects of laundering clothes.

The impulse to develop a process in this way emerged from an earlier study exploring the nature of high-density dwelling expressed in the form of the Victorian tenement and the mid-twentieth century tower block. This utilised partial and autobiographical approaches to layered and complex content, drawing on both archival and anecdotal elements of a specific built environment, to reassert the essence of that which had been lost or forgotten (principally through demolition), and that which had been recovered (through adaptation). This was further developed in a subsequent consideration of contemporary ways of living through spectral recollections, ficto-critical writing, or science fiction prototyping, with an emphasis placed on the rituals of everyday life and how directly they are intertwined with spatial memories, whether explicit, implied, or fading. It asked how we – through carefully revealing the components of such scenography, and its assembly – might develop a more resilient form and object, less burdened by conventional materiality and the direct shaping of stuff.