The MOFR - The Museum of FuturRuins, Clandon Park, Guildford, UK (2019)

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Live project in collaboration with National Trust and Allies and Morrison
Tutored by Professor Graeme Brooker and Sadie Morgan from dRMM

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In 2015, a devastating fire consumed Clandon Park Mansion, one of Britain’s finest examples of Palladian architecture, originally conceived by Giacomo Leoni. The event fractured its identity, transforming it from a preserved heritage monument into a fragile, open structure; a site suspended between loss and renewal.

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Developed as a live project in collaboration with Allies and Morrison and the National Trust, The Museum of FuturRuins (The MOFR) reconsiders how architecture can respond to destruction not through restoration, but through transformation. The proposal imagines Clandon Park as both a ruin and a museum of itself — an evolving framework where architecture and time are inextricably intertwined.

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The design introduces a new framing roof, a lightweight yet monumental gesture that both shelters and exposes the ruin beneath. This intervention reframes the mansion as the first artefact in its own collection: a recursive matryoshka-like architecture that invites visitors to traverse layered temporalities. Inside, salvaged fragments of the house are reintroduced as curatorial anchors — neither repaired nor replaced, but repositioned as living witnesses within the spatial narrative.

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Rather than resisting decay, the roof celebrates it: weathering becomes part of the exhibition, a living record of transformation. The project thus rejects the notion of conservation as freezing in time, proposing instead an active archaeology of care.

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The MOFR positions Clandon Park as a quasi-object (Michel Serres) — a site whose meaning lies not in form, but in its relationality: between past and present, ruin and reconstruction, object and observer. It becomes a machine à penser, where fragility and endurance coexist, exposing the caducity (Freud) inherent in all architecture and the inevitability of change as a condition for renewal.

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The Museum of FuturRuins is ultimately an inquiry into what it means to rebuild after loss — a meditation on time, beauty, and the future of ruins.

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Curatorial statement:

The fire of 2015 has been considered as a one-of-a-kind occasion in the life of Clandon Park. This unfortunate event disrupted the perception of the Mansion, and changed its meaning as a building. Now, it is not a building anymore and its next meaning awaits definition. It can be considered as a non-object (Ferreira Gullar) in the current condition. The tragic event also points the attention out to the caducity (Sigmund Freud) to which all things are subjected of, built environment and any preconceived idea of beauty and perfection too. This project aims to establish a new dialectic between the building itself, now a ruin, its estate, and the new and unique experience users can have. A new roof re-frames the building which becomes the first object displayed in The MOFR (The Museum Of FutuRuins). Like a russian doll, the promenade continues inside, at multiple levels, where some salvaged artefacts are brought back to life and displayed in the space. The new framing roof doesn’t stop the weathering from carrying on, even increasing the ruination of the buildings, increasing the passage of time and the resultant marks as an extra and unique value, an extra layering of time.  The building could be defined now as a quasi-object (Michel Serres), so rich in meanings and values just when connected to the use of it and to its power on enlightening the reasonings of each visitor. It works as a machine à penser, exposing the materiality that was behind the plastered walls and highlighting the precariousness of everything and its intrinsic beauty. 

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Collaborators: Allies and Morrison, National Trust
Tutors: Prof. Graeme Brooker, Sadie Morgan (dRMM)
Programme: MA Interior Design, Royal College of Art, London​

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