Melissa Travers
About
Mel is a trained set and costume designer for theatre. Wanting to expand her skills, she joined the interior design MA choosing SUPERreuse as her pathway. Always having an interest in history through her designs, she was keen to have the experience of designing a preexisting historical building. Excited to be able to choose her own project, she decided to design a community driven space, a patchwork “third” space.
23-24 Gillender Street is an 190,000 square foot Victorian/1930s modernist warehouse in East London. On visits to the site, Mel found it to be like that of a patchwork, something composed of miscellaneous parts. The site is built up of a variety of different styles, materials and periods all merged together. She began to explore the patchwork idea through a human lens, creating a patchwork of different people. Tower Hamlets is the most densely populated area in England, full of different diversity, ages and lifestyles. It was clear that Gillender Street itself lacked amenities and community space so the idea became to create a patchwork building for a patchwork of people, a community space of many different parts including a library, gallery, cafe and theatre.
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