Room for Change

As the year's framework, we will explored ways in which places of inhabitation are seen as the grain of a city, and looked at how they can be reestablished as an integral part of city life. The Unit worked on projects in Soho and Canning Town/ Beckton.

‘While it is natural and necessary for architects to concentrate on the building itself, the bright light of this often eclipses the surrounding world, darkening the very horizon that grants the building its standing. Anyone who stops to think about it knows perfectly well that individual settings are always interconnected with and dependent on a horizon that transcends them, sewn into a fabric of rooms, buildings, streets, towns, and nature, ….’
From Uncommon Ground by David Leatherbarrow



From Canning Town to Beckton, Collaborative Site Model


Recalling first exercises and interrogating a 1 ha pilot project framework, we explored and defined our individual briefs for this main project, a brief for inhabiting cities. As cities are places of different speeds and perpetual change, we investigated in these conditions with Room for Change. Located in Canning Town/ Beckton, it is a physical articulation of dayly, seasonal or long-term transformations, informed by...

agriculture, children, climate, communities, components, culture, decisions, details, densities, diversities, economies, frameworks, households, imaginations, improvisations, income, infrastructures, location, materials, needs, place, pleasures, principles, strategies, structures, tools, typologies, weather...

The propositional process implies, analysis, personal interests, experimentations, interpretations and intuition, to make coherent places at the scale of a room, dwelling, street, neighbourhood and city.


Urban Element

The urban environment of Soho, unfolds and articulates physically a condition of being together, a sharing of space and habit. Visible for some and invisible for others, by observing and abstracting the unusual within the everyday, we were looking at an element within a matrix of issues.

... accidents, basements, conversations, densities, doors, frictions, incidents, locations, narratives, neighbours, openings, repetitions, ruptures, slowness, streets, visits, walls, yards…

We intend to initiate formal, material, and structural thoughts, through subjective interpretation, judgement of scale as well as visual and material representation. As a starting point, this will help us to critically reflect on key relevant qualities and questions of urbanisms.


Berwick Street, Michael Martin

Soho's spaces are perpetually changing, some fast and some with the slowness of geological deformation. The public spaces of Berwick Street have an intense frequency of human inhabitation, following people's rythm. Documented in a very short periode of time, the work on the left explored these changing spaces, a superimposition of moments.
Mapping changes over a periode of 200 years the superimposition of larger scales revealed the inner structure of urban change, plots, volume, party-wall... a friction masses.


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Hidden Routes, Colin O'Sullivan

Behind it's clear urban blocks and their facades, Soho has hidden routes. Shared by an informal community, they are informal short-cuts through shops, car-parks, restaurants and court-yards.





Overlapping Territories, Marco Leal

Soho is a place of congestion and contested ground. Private properties extend underneath public space, allowing for diverse uses of basement spaces, below and wider side-walks, above. It is the result of a long established urban practice, where each territory found its maximum momentum.
The surface textures of sidewalks allow readings of these overlapping territories. The project explored the interdependency of texture and materiality in relation to space and its use.


Cross Walks - Journeys

Departing from the "closest geography within", our imagination of place to the physical sites in London’s East, the Thames Gateway and return, we will allow for subjective observations, recording and intuition of interest.

.... boundaries, colours, emergencies, ground, horizons, luggage, networks, openness, plan, pockets, pressure, roots, sections, silence, textures, water, wilderness…

We walked across topographies and experience unknown territories, for the year’s sites and work. As the journeys continued, we went to Stockholm in Sweden to explore particularities of location, places and water in relation to distinct urban and architectural form.


Tools and Principles

Build society like a game? With these and other forms of participations, we explored methods of local engagement on the main site, from Canning Town to Beckton.
The unit developed physical interventions or tools and practices of doing or principles, to engage with local communities in spatial and social processes.



Neighbour-Maker, Masamori Magota and Naohiro Mizushima, December 2007



... actions, cultures, contradictions, diversities, fabrications, ideas, imports, loud, making, operations, play, rules, stories, talk, voids …

Anticipating scenarios and enabling tools, we build 1:1 to engage 1:1. Interaction might have reversed our expectations and allowed for times to be taught.




Folding Table, Richard Stevenson and Yonghyun Ryu, November 2007
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Study trip to Stockholm, 03 - 09 February 2008


The expected and the unexpected… arriving in Stockholm, cold, windswept, snow drenched… walking face to ground… in early February Unit 2 arrived in a city expecting harsh climate and short days.

Unit 2 spent six demanding days in the Swedish capital of Stockholm, a city, with an infrastructural attitude to pedestrian and unique connections, were an inspiration and an education.
Unit 2 occupied St. Marks’s, Skogskyrkogården, Slüssen, Gamla Stan, Hammersby and always the Kulturhuset. City space made and enclosed on six floors, ten ways in, five ways out. It is not a shopping centre, the aim is not pursuit of profit, but of life, social relationships and provision of space for the city’s people and their kids, to play chess, read one of the papers... enjoying, watching, co-existing. It is the city in microcosm, the ultimate place for strangers … an internal urban landscape.
A city serving people first, allowing them to occupy public spaces inside and out, providing a myriad of places for the unexpected ... this place succeeds. It is a social attitude to city building which is lacking in much of London. Stockholm is less concerned with the architecture of the grand statement than with the ability of a person to push a pram up some steps, to move seamlessly between modes of transport without getting cold or to cross the road easily and not be afraid of speeding traffic.
Architecture and the city are one co-dependent entity, and the ability to make a well functioning and beautiful city is the architect’s most crucial skill.


Colin O'Sullivan (Diploma Unit 2) and Jane Clossick (MA Alternative Urbanisms www.ma-au.blogspot.com)




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Kulturhusset Stockholm - Unit 2's base, images by C. Hadrys

Room for Change - 1Ha Pilot Project

Recalling previous exercises and interrogating a 1 ha pilot project framework, we will explore and de.ne our individual briefs for this main project, a brief for inhabiting cities. As cities are places of different speeds and perpetual change, we will investigate in these conditions with Room for Change. Located in Canning Town/ Beckton, it will be a physical articulation of dayly, seasonal or long-term transformations, informed by...

... agriculture, children, climate, communities, components, culture, decisions, details, densities, diversities, economies, frameworks, households, imaginations, improvisations, income, infrastructures, location, materials, needs, place, pleasures, principles, strategies, structures, tools, typologies, weather...

The propositional process implies, analysis, personal interests, experimentations, interpretations and intuition, to make coherent places at the scale of a room, dwelling, street, neighbourhood and city.


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Walk by Night, Ela Sidor



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Navigators, James Lim
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Unit 2 Site Model

"In design process, a model is the closest to architecture."
Lewrence Bird, 2000.


Looking at the physical appearance, entity and open endedness of the site, the Unit produced a site model in the scale 1:1000.

The model is be composed of a series of metal frames holding individual model casts. The metal frames are produced of a 30mm flat steel. Their form will resemble site boundaries and other important and distinct linear conditions, like roads or waterways.

Each student will produced a series of casts, 27mm in thickness. The casts will hold 1 ha pilot project context and actual site, existing and proposed.



Unit 2 model and Naohiro Mizushima, image by Rob Houmoller



To be continued ...



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