In its seventh year of operation, the Permanent Gallery in Bedford Place, Brighton, has inaugurated a series of artists’ residencies called Platform X.  The most recent incumbent, Samuel Dowd, paid an early visit to the Design Archives in preparation of his ‘Living Rooms’ installation.  Here he made intensive use of the Design Council and Joseph Emberton collections shown to him by Archivist Sue Breakell.  This project proposed to utilise the gallery space as a living studio-workshop with an associated programme of film screenings, and a montage of copies of research material from the archives subsequently made its contribution to the studio-workshop environment.

Dowd’s ambition for the residency was the construction of a prototype contemporary dwelling space at the Weald Allotments site in Hove.  This was to be realised in the spirit of ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, embodying structural and interior design, horticulture, the arts, crafts, and environmental and social theory.  His work in the archives informed his survey of earlier living experiments and visionary architecture.  These, plus evidence of social subcultures and the rise of the environmental movement were re-imagined as a utopian topography.