Showcase 2022 Student Spotlight: Olivia Haigh

The CRT Archives by Olivia Haigh

BA (Hons) Interior Architecture and Design

The CRT Archives is a private building that provides work and living spaces for a team of archivists, who work towards procuring old televisions and the programmes that are shown through them.

The archive recognises the importance of this pioneering object and invites the public into some spaces of the building where the objects are displayed in a gallery manner. Monumental moments will be broadcasted across the televisions and watching these moments will provoke a certain emotion or memory of the public user.

Elements of the object inspire parts of the proposed architecture, for example the shape of the cathode ray tube stimulates the movement of a user through the space, by incorporating dropped ceilings and unconventional room shapes this was achieved.

Other, more subtle inspiration was taken from the movement of the electron which moves in a line pattern in order to produce an image on a television screen. From this, the proposed windows have many mullions, so when the sun shines through it will cast line shadows on the floors in the internal spaces.

Olivia Haigh, creator, said: “The purpose of this project was to understand the importance of archiving the pioneering object that is the cathode ray tube television, an object that is no longer being manufactured due to the high demand of a technologically led society.

Being from Manchester myself (location of the site), I understood the needs of the demographic around the Norther Quarter area and how I would get users to want to visit the archives. So, a highlight of this project would be using a start, middle and end of the public user journey, where a bar has been situated on the upper floors of the building forcing them to meander through the archive gallery spaces before reaching the view and bar at the top.”

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