Rachel Cronin

Rachel is an Architectural Designer based in London. She completed her undergraduate degrees in 2017 at Sydney’s University of Technology in Interior Architecture and International Studies, where she was invited to tutor in her final year. During this time, she also studied for one year in Lyon, France. Rachel's professional practice has involved a variety of scales and programs within the architectural discipline, having worked for design focused studios in Sydney, Berlin, Paris and throughout her masters for NVBL in London.

Her personal practice interests lie at the intersection of art and architecture, allowing for a diverse range of influences. During her time at the RCA, Rachel’s projects have focused on domestic landscapes, and strange intimacies reinterrogating the spatial conditions of everyday life through a transformative and observational approach.

Windows

Understanding the window as a portal, a lens, and a frame, the project explores the transformative capacity of the domestic interior as a physical yet simultaneously psychological space. Informed by the perceptual changes which occur as a result of Alzheimer’s disease, a series of domestic interiors are proposed as still images compiled as a video work, resulting in a space which is constantly undergoing transformation. The images are derived from personal memories and experiences, observations of past and present domestic landscapes somewhere between London and Sydney.

The project argues that buildings, like memories or people, are in states of change, and that these states exist simultaneously, whether in the material memory of the architecture itself, or in the projected reality of its current or future occupants. Challenging the preconceived notion of the finality of the built environment, the project studies its potential for decay, distortion, re-appropriation and reinterpretation, revealing its parallel states.

Intently, the work uses as subject matter the most unassuming domestic interiors, for their recognisability and un-exceptionality; that of the Victorian terraced housing, with the interference of elements of Australian suburbia. Through considered composition, the project offers a glimpse into the multiplicity of the domestic interior, encouraging empathy for, and awareness of those living with Alzheimer’s disease, where the experience of changing perceptual states is inevitable.

The paradigmatic device of transition, archetypal to the window – now and then, here to there, inside to outside – is used as an architectural and compositional device to propose a series of interiors represented through images. The interiors are expressed as fifteen moments, from The Disturbance, to The Disappearance, to The Memory, conceived not as single objects but as a morphing and unravelling experience, that expands and contracts, disappears and reappears. This silent video is to be watched with the sounds of your own domestic interior to accompany it.

Medium:

Video Work

Size:

3840 x 2160 px

Now

The Disturbance

The Intruder I

The Intruder II

The Construction Site

The Intruders III

Garden Door

The Disappearance I

Ghost

The Dream I

The Dream II

The Disappearance II

The Aftermath

The Memory

In my work the elements and scenes of the domestic interior are considered to take on a human presence, altered to become not metaphors for the loss of memory, or the disorientation of the Alzheimer’s patient, but objects of empathy and self reflection, to instill an awareness of the fragility of our own perception. Alzheimer's disease was equally as revelatory on the nature of the built environment, as the elements of the built environment were when deployed as a mechanism to depict an alternative state of being.

Medium:

Digital Renders

Size:

800 x 450 mm

Prints

Cutting and Folding

Stairs-Cut Out I

Frame-Cut Out II

Shadows-Cut Out III

Throughout my practice this year it has been consistently important to question the medium. Working with 3D digital imagery, which then through a process of printing the images and transforming them once again through cutting and folding, revealed a new potential of distortion and transformation inherent to the materiality of the image, and therefore of the space. This process of composition and decomposition is ongoing and will be continued in further studies.

Medium:

Printed 160gsm Cartridge Paper

Size:

420 x 297 mm

Collage Fragment

This video is of an early research model of spaces of personal memories. Through the use of a screen and projections, the model proposes a multi-frame image.

Porch

Kitchen

1:20 Models

Medium:

Photograph, Various Materials

Untitled 1

Untitled 2

Untitled 3

Untitled 4

These sketches are part of a series developed over the year of the geometry of my own flat interacting with its environment. As the domestic interior is impossible to stage, they became integral components of observation in the design of the final image series.

Medium:

Pencil on cartridge paper

Size:

297 x 210 mm

Rachel Cronin

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Royal College of Art