There is an art to designing a building with an ordinary brief where the familiar is made novel, the predictable innovative, and the conventional distinctive. It takes that which history has cast upon the shores of our own time as mere flotsam of the past, and recognises it as inherently worthy.

Electric Ladyland is just such a project.
While the plan making pays homage to current masters, it is reflective and interpretative, much as one musician might pay homage by creating variations on the theme of another.

This is a site of remembrances with the memory of changing functions layered into built form. It is a clear demonstration of how to find value in the ordinary stock of built heritage and elevate it as resource through the deceptive easiness in the locating of additional pavilions thereby drawing the whole together into an ensemble.

The architects are inventive in their resolution of the tectonics and assembly of elements that they never allow to become commonplace and mindless. The process of assembly and manufacture, of production and use are all part of the repertoire and bring life to and animate the design.

This is a highly cerebral design and adds a dimension to the local current debate as to what should be informing us in our search for architectural identity. In the execution of the design we are offered some clues: