At the end of 2021 Festival Theatreformen asked us to design a temporary pavilion for their music and performance festival the following June. We started by organising a participatory workshop on the site - Herzogin Anna Amalia Platz in Brauschweig - with various deaf and disabled artists (from both the UK and Germany), sharing stories and creative ideas about what works and what doesn’t work in terms of diverse access needs. Richard Dougherty, a Deaf architect, led on the design supported by Deaf architectural consultant Chris Laing along with Zoe Partington and Jos Boys from DisOrdinary Architecture.

The project starts from concepts of Deaf Gain and DeafSpace – that is, the rich performative and spatial qualities of using sign language. The pavilion is circular, expressing the social shape-making inherent to signing, where people form circles to easily see and communicate with each other. The pavilion became a double circle, with the centre open to the sky, called The Clearing, surrounded by a band of covered seating and framed by the fluidity of string curtains.

This idea has also generated a number of other 'clearings' in the Plaza, such as lamp-post pedestals (to hold drinks and other items, and to lean against); bike-racks converted into seats (to shift support from mobile cyclists to less mobile members of the community); different kinds of seats adapting existing uncomfortable concrete benches; and floor vinyl posters that helped ameliorate the difficulties of wheelchair users of cobbled surfaces. The ultimate aim was to offer a range of places and adapted elements to accommodate a diverse range of inhabitants, supporting our many different ways of being in the world.