The parade of buildings between Waterloo Terrace and Barnsbury Street, of which the proposed site forms the north corner, act as a prominent and all but intact late 19th Century block fronting Upper Street. In spite of the of the uniformity of heights, party-wall and shopfront/town house rhythm the original composition conceived as a symmetrical Palladian palazzo with a defined centre, extended ‘wings’ with end ‘pavilions’ is strong enough to question the missing part. This part, 168 Upper Street was significantly damaged during WWII and eventually demolished in its entirety. Remaining empty until Aria, a local design and furniture retailer purchased it in 2012, held an invited design competition for proposals before taking it through planning approval and now construction on site. MEMORY + THE MISREMEBERED Given the otherwise wholly intact nature of the block and good condition of its detailing our approach has been to remember or rather misremember the missing piece. After all we cannot build using the same materials to meet today’s standards and arguably why should we given the opportunities available to us. Similarly, of the multitude of creative options possible, the idea of looking to the past and the past looking back seemed so full of possibilities. We therefore began by simply aiming to return the original symmetry of the palazzo in all its form and detailing. But as a full height double skin insitu terracotta/cement mix fully loadbearing structural shell, conceived as a 1:1 monument cast from the building bombed during WW2. Very much drawn from Rachel Whiteread (Ghost House, London), Do Ho Suh (Home within Home), Diener+Diener (Natural History Museum, Berlin) and Edouard Francois (Hotel Fouquet, Paris). All external mouldings, window surrounds and features as well internal skirting, dado rails, cornices and anaglypta wallpaper were modelled. The CAD information then robotically routed into expanded polystyrene formwork before the mix was poured in. In order that this effort isn’t seen as an attempt to perfectly mimic the past, instead alluding to memory, indeed misremembered pasts the finish is monolithic, slipping in areas, imperfect and in some parts wholly misplaced. Has the CAD information been emailed incorrectly, did the robot reboot and drop few lines or have the site crew put one piece of formwork in the wrong place. As well as reminding us that our ideas/memories of the past are often edited and adjusted to suit our present and futures, the notion that the “making/construction” is also misremembered suggests that what we feel is rational and controlled is also fluid. Within the monolithic cast shell, new internal floor plates literally represent the new habitation pattern. Located where convenient and of a very different and gentler material, the Cross laminated Timber Floor plates are alien to the monument and carried through with new domestic windows cut where required without respect to the older window locations or their surrounding neoclassical detail. Windows have minimal frames with both fixed and operable terracotta panels being recessed into the façade, enhancing the detailed reading and mass of the cast terracotta structural shell.