The Museum of Lost Places, located in Gravesend, Kent, is a new museum typology where buildings threatened with demolition are 3D scanned, reconstructed and experienced ‘virtually’ within a bespoke physical environment.
James Stirling’s No.1 Poultry, the Smithson’s Robin Hood Gardens and Ladywell Baths in Lewisham are exhibited in the first phases of the development. Interlaced fragments of these threatened buildings are physically reconstructed as seamless homogeneous concrete ‘casts’, overlaid with a digital ‘soft’ layer experienced through a Virtual Reality headset.
This pioneering building type seeks out a ‘digital tectonic’ through the careful interlayering of media, time and built form. The film presents a journey through both the museum's physical and virtual existence - an exploration into a new form of hybridised space that could soon become a common typology. A mesmerising experience, where voices from the past are given a volumetric richness and where a building's’ potential future can be experienced in an accelerated space-time.
