Xindi Su

Project Description

Vaulting the Cordiner’s Edge: Crafting Lost Grounds
Lasts, Trees, Cabinets and Counters

cordiner (noun): an archaic term for a shoemaker

Set in a Mytho-Poetic condition within the city of Edinburgh, the Nor Loch thrives once more, from the bottom of Castle Hill down to Canongate. Situated along the edges of this thriving wetland territory, is the Institute of Cordiners. The Incorporation of Cordiners, once a thriving and powerful guild in Edinburgh, and now a craft suppressed and forgotten, is thus caught in a temporal mediation; a return of traditional artisanal heritage, blended with productive mechanisms for the demands in an age of mass, restoring shoemaking to contemporary status, an edge of two places.

The Cordiner’s Bench, an archival device facilitating the shoe, becomes remodeled to allow rupture, forming the tectonic language of the Cordiner. Through the translation of its elements into an architectural system - the Cabinet and its Drawers, and the Counter, the Cabinet becomes the central Last Tower, holding productive space, material libraries, and the Drawers, its machines. The Counter spreads between the juddered shoe tree as observatory decks to the wetland, as spaces to sit, to walk, to look. The Counter holds the Emporium, the Archive, the School of Shoemakers, part grounded into the city, part stepped into the wetland, allowing non-human and human inhabitation within, beneath and above. The Cordiner’s demarcated edge is a place not bound by memory of the past, dragged from extinction, but an internalisation of its history, into reimagined function, for the present.

The Pattern of Parts: Translating Tectonic Language

As the material is formed over the last, the shoemaker calculates to precise perfection, accounting for the shoe to stretch, expand and adjust, crafting directly to the foot’s anatomy. After all, the shoe must fit, to allow the wearer to meet and wander the city.

A system of craft by mass production appears to be a seeming paradox, yet the organisation of a School of Craft intertwined with the teachings by craftsmen within an active productive system open to the public allows shoemaking to be restored to contemporary status.

The organisation of a productive factory structure, combined with the operations and technical studios of designers and a School of Cordiner apprentices balances the combination of the various working needs differentiated by the range of operating methods, allowing all of them all to inhabit one singular place. The architecture becomes representative of the various functions working together, dictated by the production of the shoe. The Institute also houses the archive, displaying walls of lasts, research material and exhibitions of shoemaking. Instead of remaining a closed boundary, the Institute is welcome to visitors, researchers and clients, allowing them to view the process of making through the craftsmen and the apprentices.

The Inhabited Edge: A Temporal Mediation

This is a place where the Cordiner continues to survive, inspiring the young to follow the ideals of the radical shoemaker - of liberty, equality and fraternity. He remains a significant phenomenon in the politics of the common people, and will continue to serve them well. And he has, collectively and through a surprisingly large number of individuals, made his mark on both history and hereafter.