Dan Adams: We focus on creating novel urban experiences in cities through the engagement with things that are often outside of the public domain such as infrastructure and industry. We have learned, through the process of building, that these complicated projects don’t have a definition from the beginning, so a lot of our effort is before the architectural design starts. When we set out to work on the salt dock, we first thought about how we would impose our own language, our own content on to the salt piles in Chelsea. It was only through the engagement with the salt operator and the community that we switched to an everyday language and set of references which in turn really changed the whole dynamic (Figure 1, Figure 2). It went from us imposing something to being much more in concert with community events, so you see something like “Go Sox” being projected on the salt. That was a revelatory moment for us in how to give up degrees of authorship and to start inheriting other people’s interests to really embed them in the process. By being present in the community, we were able to negotiate a new conversation between various groups. This incremental process was revelatory to us in that there was an opportunity to reengage that industry and the city it was serving.

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