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This article reflects on the use of arts based research methods to engage with a regional history of modern architecture and urbanism. Moving between archival sources and remaining physical sites in East Sussex, the art practice Photolanguage (Nigel Green & Robin Wilson) documented and reimagined the modernist legacy in this region of Southern England. Through photography, the gathering of found objects and notation, we construct ‘new’ narratives of place, working across, or in between the official, or dominant, narratives of local history. This reflection back on the production of work for the exhibition East Sussex Modern (2016), focuses on our adoption of the modern ‘sunken garden’ as a recurrent, topographic theme, and our exploration and projective appropriation of found ruins as alternative examples of this official, municipal typology of public space. The work of Photolanguage (Nigel Green & Robin Wilson) has consistently engaged with the remains of modernism within the post-industrial city and its hinterland landscapes, in project sites that have included the cities of Rouen, Calais, Gloucester, Copenhagen, Malmö and Paris. The practice employs an experimental use of image and text within its projects to both record and also re-imagine the modern urban artefact, to surcharge the photographically recorded object with different narrative possibilities. The media and methods of ‘reimagining’ are diverse, involving the use of different strategies of digital and material image production, montage and assemblage. However, they are deployed with deference to the essential capacity of photography itself to transform, to offer a perceptual reengagement and critical reconceptualization of its object. The theme of ‘radical foundations’ is employed here as a framework through which to reflect on the meaning and efficacy of this ‘perceptual reengagement’ in relation to urban and landscape sites encountered in our participation in the exhibition project East Sussex Modern (2016). As a work of practice-based research this article constructs its discourse from the period of artistic practice that preceded it. It is not simply intended to be a linear account of that project, but is a theorized reflection which also explores its research processes and representations further. As a journey back through the work, it affects a certain reconfiguration of the sequence of the work’s original evolution. It discovers and explores associations both active and latent in the original phase of work. In this sense, the article pursues a conception of research as, to borrow the words of Rolf Hughes, ‘another form of architectonic practice’, and seeks to clarify and evolve the initial performance of the work as a creative and critical inquiry. (Hughes, 2006: 284) The brief of the project East Sussex Modern was to produce art work that responded to the legacy of modernist architecture in the region of East Sussex, with a particular focus on the role of the Borough and Water Engineer Sidney Little (1885-1961) in the interwar period. Little was responsible for the now destroyed St Leonard’s Bathing Pool and Lido (1933) and much of the existing, multi-level seafront of Hastings and St Leonards (1938). A committed modernist, Little also harboured more ambitious plans to extend the concept of the multilevel city to Hastings on a broader scale, to separate vehicle from pedestrian spaces. While these plans remained unrealized, Little did extensively modernize the water infrastructure of the Hastings agglomeration, with deep tunnelled aqueducts connecting the town to new concrete dams at Powdermill (1932) and Darwell (1949). Photolanguage’s contribution to the exhibition was entitled ‘Journeys in a Modern Topography’. Our journey began as a series of fieldtrips to key sites relating to Little’s work within the region, but it also involved the incremental construction of new, associative connections between these sites, combining an ‘official’ itinerary of Little’s built, modern legacy, with other, ‘found’ sites discovered en route. These formed an imagined history of regional modernism, and were presented in a way that suggested them to be a series of previously undocumented ‘constructions’. Within the exhibition the boundaries between fact and fiction were blurred; archival and photographic ‘evidence’ supported the projection of an alternative modernity. Qualified in such terms as the ground, the substratum, the footing, the ‘foundation’ could be understood to be a recurrent motif in the imagery of Photolanguage. The majority of the ‘foundation’ spaces we discuss here are, as objects of photographic attention, ‘found’ spaces that are, in effect, recovered through the act of recording. They are often ruins, left overs, the discarded, the misplaced; they are of a visual substratum. We would qualify these ‘ruins’ as foundation spaces because they are for us also generative as essential spaces of the urban ground; spaces of radical, negative accretion. The act of photographic documentation initiates for us an act of recuperation of such territories from a condition below the thresholds of vision, marginal to the economies of urban and architectural legibility, toward their reconfiguration as schematic sites and raw material for the construction of alternative, modern narratives. Foundation Space 1: Plans for ‘Front Line Improvements’ Between 1924 and 1930 the Hastings Borough Engineer’s Office, led by Sidney Little, drew up plans for an extensive programme of ‘Front Line Improvements’ to the Hastings and St Leonards sea wall and beach front. Little’s drawings for these improvements, now in the regional archives of The Keep in Brighton, provided for us a starting point for the description, illustration and reconceptualization of a journey across a series of modern topographies and spaces of foundation. Little’s section drawings codify the dynamic space of confrontation between land and sea into a concise set of stable material properties, furnished with dimensions and succinct textual labels. He delineates the topographic boundaries of the ‘beach line’ and ‘rock level’, and instructs that piles are ‘to be driven to rock level or other suitable foundations’. The new coastal wall, providing for a substantially widened promenade with car parking spaces beneath, is to be constructed in ‘precast concrete’ and ‘basalt faced blocks’, with ‘reinforced counterfort frames’. This would seem to anchor our journey in the most stable of foundation spaces: the designs of an engineer armouring the modern coastal town against nature’s most persistent force of attrition. However, as spaces/ surfaces of signification the drawings are also characterized by elements of uncertainty, revision and embellishment. Alongside the resolved, modern scheme of improvement is an architecture and topography of amendment, of error and cancellation. The archive presents us, not simply with the final form of coastal defence, perfected and signed off, but with a certain level of working-out still in evidence, the marks of an imperfect process of proposal and adjustment, all indelibly inscribed in coloured ink. Even a section of the mighty sea wall has been ‘cancelled’. Figure 1. County Borough of Hastings: front line improvement, 1924 bill: cross sections of sea walls, by Sidney Little, Hastings Borough Engineer’, 1930 (ref BOT/1/25129C) (detail). Figure 2. County Borough of Hastings: front line improvement, 1924 bill: cross sections of sea walls, by Sidney Little, Hastings Borough Engineer’, 1930 (ref BOT/1/25129C) (detail). Figure 3. Cross section drawing of the rockery garden and its erroneous ‘ghost’. County Borough of Hastings: front line improvement, 1924 bill: cross sections of sea walls, by Sidney Little, Hastings Borough Engineer’, 1930 (ref BOT/1/25129C) (detail). Although signed by the engineer and in the more technical format of the section, these drawings are certainly not the product of an artless hand and, as one closes in on the details of the scheme, one cannot help but take note of unexpected nuances in the deployment of Little’s chosen media: the confident, inky curvatures of an arrow, the modulation in the strength and attitude of the hand-written typography; the aquatic quality of the gradients of green wash serving as the body colour of the masonry. The masonry sections have a subtle touch of Art Deco about them, a stylistic leaning which is confirmed in the detailing of the realized coastal architecture and furnishings of the seafront. There is, one might suggest, something of an aesthetic programme within the prescribed, technical format; a stylistic disposition and confidence subtly at work within the quite meagre diagrammatic limits of the section. These effects of drawing error and expression exhibit their strongest effects within a detail of the surface of the redesigned promenade. Little indicates the placement of, what he labels, a ‘Rock Garden’, positioned on the landward side of the promenade, within the limits of the existing sea wall. The outline of the rock garden is drawn in a cerise coloured ink, and the body of the form is coloured-in with a brown wash. An arrow is drawn in the same cerise ink to link the form to its annotation, which is written above in free-hand in black ink. It seems that cerise had been introduced as a result of a mistake and is the chosen colour of amendment, for next to the brown lump of the proposed rockery is, what might be described as, a ghost rockery, the beginnings of an initial attempt at the form positioned, it would seem, erroneously, a little too far to the south, to the seaward side. The outline of the ghost rockery is indicated by a series of lively marks in black ink, which have been crossed out in the cerise ink (small, neat crosses trace the erroneous outline, and also annul an arrow that linked the annotation to the abandoned, ‘ghost rockery’). (See figure 3) In our search through the available archive mater

A journey through modern foundations: Re-imagining modernity in the work of Photolanguage