Platt Hall Tutorial

After the Platt Hall visit we had a group tutorial where about 12 of us (extra people had to attend) sat around and spoke about our own initial ideas and then we each gave our own feedback. My idea stemmed from focussing on bringing in the children as the targeted audience and it was turn Platt Hall into a doll house. This would be achieved by creating a miniature version of Platt Hall in doll house form and have pieces of the collection in this doll house. The pieces in the doll house would then be super sized and placed in the exact same positions in the real Platt Hall. The doll house would be placed in the entrance of Platt Hall so that visitors would see it before anything else and then when they walk through the real Platt Hall it is as if they are walking around the doll house. The aim of this idea was to bring the objects to life and involve the audience mor, I thought the contrast between the minute detail of the doll house and the sheer size of the large objects would be enough to impress all age ranges and visitors.
To run alongside this idea I also had the idea that dolls would be placed in the doll house and then acting students could volunteer to dress up as that doll and be placed in the same room and come to life to explain to visitors their own backstory and the backstory of other objects in the room. This again runs along the theme of bringing toys to life and involving the audience but is less practical as it would mean ahving volunteers, costume and also timed tours so that the visitors would be able to turn up for the start of the talk.
In the tutoria, I am not sure if I explained my ideas that well as most of the feedback seemed to run more along the lines of making the audience smaller and Platt Hall bigger, which they quite righly thought was impossible. One idea was to make a fake door at the front of Platt Hall that was tiny and would then open up into the Hall. I liked the idea and thought it was very 'Alice in Wonderland-y' but the idea I was working with wasn't so much changing the size of the house and more putting the audience into the doll house version, which if the audience were shrunk down, they would be proportionate to the rest of Platt Hall - apart from the Mary Greg objects which would be large in the doll house.
After the tutorial I was talking over my idea with Philippa Watkin who was also part of the Mary Greg project but not in my tutorial and it turned out that one of our ideas - and our main one - was to make Platt Hall into a doll house. We then discussed how we were planning on developing these ideas, me with the larger objects and Philippa wanted to make the doll house fully fitted with lights so that people had to look through the windows to see what was going on and also to have a mechanical Mary Greg wandering Platt Hall. I liked this idea as I thought it would convey some of the eerie element that we all felt when wandering the back rooms of Platt Hall, particularly with the dresses. I also thought it would be another idea to involve and interest both adults and children. We then decided to collaborate on the project, working on the doll house together and doing the presentation together.
We researched doll houses by getting books from the library and Philippa was also fortunate enough to find a doll house book in a book sale. After seeing all the intricacies of doll house making we decided to make cardboard versions of our own houses as practices for layout and design.