Churchillians Angus Goodwin & Joe Halligan (U06) have made history as members of Assemble — the first art, architecture & design collective to win the Turner Prize.
Assemble are a London-based collective who work across the fields of art, design and architecture to create projects in tandem with the communities who use and inhabit them.
The group won the prize for an ongoing collaboration with local residents and others in the Granby Four Streets, Liverpool — a group of terraced houses, which residents have been fighting to save from demolition for the past decade.
The Granby Four Street terraces were built around 1900 to house artisan workers. Following the Toxteth riots in 1981, the council acquired many of the houses in the area for demolition and redevelopment. Hundreds of people were moved out the area and houses subsequently fell into disrepair.
Assemble are working with the Granby Four Streets CLT and Steinbeck Studios to overhaul 10 houses in the area. The project presents a sustainable and incremental vision for the area that builds on the hard work already done by local residents and translates it to the refurbishment of housing, public space and the provision of new work and enterprise opportunities.
Greenhouse: Part of Assemble’s project at Granby Four Street in Liverpool.
Championing a working practice that is interdependent and collaborative, Assemble seek to to address the typical disconnection between the public and the process by which places are made by actively involving the public as both participant and collaborator.
Assemble began working together in 2010 and are comprised of 18 members, many of whom are Cambridge graduates — including Angus Goodwin & Joe Halligan, who were both undergraduate architect students at Churchill College.
For the Turner prize show Assemble created a showroom of products made by 9 Granby Street residents as part of the Granby Workshop project — a social enterprise set up by the collective as a result of the nomination. Participants were been trained and employed in a workshop making handmade products from demolition waste and construction rubble. Proceeds from the sale of all the items displayed in the showroom will go back into the project.
Granby Project Showroom created for the Turner Prize show.
The Turner Prize was created by the Tate Britain in 1984 and is a prestigious annual award given to an artist under the age of 50 working in the UK. Previous winners include; Damien Hirst, Grayson Perry and Steve McQueen.
