BURY UNITARIAN CHURCH

Day View

I have been asked to add a simple signage to an existing church in our local town in Bury. Previously we had done some renovation works to its toilets and kitchen.LINK

Knowing the fact that this church was initially built and design by my chairman himself back in 1970's, it's a great honour and rare opportunity to look at the original hand-drawn drawings given to me as the main reference for this work. The drawing is still well-preserved on its tracing paper. I felt a refreshing joy looking at this piece of art. To be honest, it feels like looking at an authentic drawing by Frank Llyod Wright. I keep wondering if in the future we'd have the same emotion looking at archived CAD drawing. Can our vast customised digitalised printed works survive as a piece of art or would they be treated as another ordinary paper without any special meaning to it?

The original hand-drawn drawing

Although is just a small work, the impact is quite huge to the community. This is a voluntary and charitable contribution from the Chairman to its local church. Despite knowing that this work would not contribute monetary profit to the company, my director in-charge still insisted me to go to the site and take photographs of the site. Since I've been given two conditions; (1) it is charity work and (2) it is definitely an important contribution, I take serious care on the quality of output and at the same time optimising the man-hour on the job.

The effort that my chairman tries to contribute to his local community has brought me thinking of how little we as the architectural practitioners have done to our local area. Maybe because most of architect firms would rather reside in the city centre or elite places where the rich and famous live that made us abandon our own neighbours and villages that are sometimes more in need. To survive in the competitive business do we really have to sacrifice our social liability as architects?

Night View

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