Writtle Calling is a temporary radio station, designed in collaboration with ARUP Engineers, to be sited in the grounds of Writtle College in Essex. The area holds importance in radio history as the first site of public radio broadcasts by Marconi Engineers. In 1922, every Tuesday evening, a live performance was broadcast under the calling name ‘2EmmaToc’ from an ex-army hut in the fields surrounding Writtle.
Post Works’s radio station, Writtle Calling, is scheduled to be built in Spring/Summer 2011, after which it will tour other venues in the UK. The radio station will host a series of live events and performances over the period of one month that will be broadcast to a local area. Regional practitioners such as artists, agriculturalists and archaeologists, will be asked to respond to the idea of ‘Site’, both in terms of the physical locality of the station and the wider regional landscape of Essex. The structure of Writtle Calling is derived from a collage of local Essex vernaculars, a peculiar hybrid of temporary structures and permanent dwellings, and local and imported architectures. The architectures used for this hybrid were sourced from photos taken at random during a car journey along the A12 from the edges of London to Writtle College. The photo ‘fragments’ were then re/de-scaled and synthesised into a new form. This form is to be rendered and constructed from materials associated with the original photo sources of the collage, and with the area’s contemporary and historic vernacular.
Drawing, Tom Noonan.
