Emma Scott

The site of interest is the interior fabric and layout of the town centre. The analysis of the site produces an inventory of structures and objects which appear in architecture in the principal form of allegory. The project will reinvest the concrete columns and ramps and other elements of Cumbernauld with unique characters that stir the memory/imagination of the town’s inhabitants.

The project involves the build of a magical arcade. The design narrative adopts the psychoanalytic method of Free Association. This is played out by the characters of Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin and Aldo Rossi who are the key inhabitants of the magical arcade. Freud, the psychoanalyst, plays the part of the memory collector;  Walter Benjamin, the literary critic, is the fanatical storymaker; while Aldo Rossi, the architect, takes on the persona of the flaneur, whose ideas fluctuate between the real and the imaginary. Rossi has been appointed the rooms and cities maker for a re-imagined Cumbernauld centre.