This year Unit 9 will make projects both at a city scale and that of architectural fragments: windows, doorways and passages; and consider the relationship that these scales of architectural concern have between each other.

CITY WITHIN CITY
Most unplanned cities, of which London is a spectacular example, are made up of multiple efforts either by individuals or social groups, corporate bodies, housing associations and developers. Generations of occupants settle and appropriate the fabric to which they can afford. From the Huguenots in late Seventeenth Century Spitalfields to the present-day Bangladeshi communities around Brick Lane who bring further characterisation to these urban enclaves.

We will study ten such precedents - all pieces of city where the spatial and physical conditions have been defined or evolved in pursuit of particular ideals, necessities, dreams and demands. From 19th century almshouses to the collegiate quarters of Cambridge, Barceloneta to the Inns of Court and the Hotel Particuliers in Paris to the Georgian squares of London’s West End. At once autonomous city microcosms, they are of course interdependent to their wider context,‘cities within cities’.

Learning from our studies and working at scales of 1:500 and 1:200 we will adopt, adjust and transpose the ideas observed within these urban typologies to our site for this year’s project. We will work within a two-hectare plot bordering the north side of Hoxton Square in London’s Shoreditch towards the creation of a new urban neighbourhood where the public spaces are imbued with the private intensity of the dwellings that form them.

WINDOWS WITHIN WALLS
‘Windows are architecture’. They define buildings both as interior experience and exterior expression. They reveal forms of construction and characterise the cities to which they contribute. Post war concrete frame housing in Britain, the stone framed facades of Lyon, Haussmann’s Paris and the brick Georgian walls of London are all distinctive conditions born of social, economic, and material imperatives. A single image of ‘their’ buildings can reveal the city to which they belong, their differences: scale, proportion, material and window configuration.

Working within the urban propositions developed in the first part of the year, students will be asked to consider in detail the architectural fragments of buildings that impact our experience of place and interrogate the qualities that make up a particular atmosphere: the bits of buildings we touch, pass through and lean upon, the smell and light that a mixed climate has upon different surfaces across the seasons. We will consider material choices through association and memory, considering the direct emotional response we have towards them.