The Beauty from Within

Akerman Road Neighbourhood Resource Centre, London, England

Shortlisted proposal for Art Commission, 2009

The scope of the commission includes collaborating with the architects on the design of a series of corten steel panels for the ground floor façade of the building. The Resource Centre’s building design took its form from a cross and a base of a boat. The entrance hall divides the building in two, almost like a church. The inside facilities are deployed into wings to the north and south of the entrance, main stair and lifts.

Elpida is interested in the analogy between architecture and the human body. Both skin and buildings protect and shelter, while providing a means to express identity – whether personal, political, religious or cultural. Her proposal The Beauty from Within was built on the idea of the Resource Centre being “a metaphor, a container, a body, where the body becomes a hollow, vessel-like space and the skin is not imagined as sack-like and soft, but as static and solid, a self-contained ‘balloon’ filled with air”. For her, the skin of architecture also created a protective enclosure for an internal mechanism; the skin breathes and helps to reduce heat and noise emissions.

Elpida proposed using images of repetitive skin motifs - taken from the protective layer of the stomach. This vein-like structure would then wrap the building and create a narrative.