ARU

The Architecture Research Unit (ARU) is a design laboratory for built research based at the Department of Architecture and Spatial Design, London Metropolitan University, directed by Professor Florian Beigel. It is an award-winning architectural project studio, designing housing, public buildings, industrial and office buildings, and urban/landscape design projects internationally.

ARU is an architectural design laboratory primarily concerned with the exploration of ideas about space. These ideas are tested in live projects. We consider these live projects to be design as research. During recent years ARU has investigated concepts of space appropriate for designing in contemporary complexity such as:

* infrastructural architecture, designing for uncertainty - designing potential;
* the idea of proximity of differences;
* incompleteness;
* time in architecture;
* emptiness, or the space between objects;
* the interior in the exterior and the exterior in the interior;
* a plan of rooms without corridor;
* architectural landscapes;
* construction as a conveyor of feeling.

Significant projects of Florian Beigel and ARU include: the Half Moon Theatre in London; Bishopsfield, a regeneration of a courtyard housing estate of the 1960’s in Harlow New Town, England; Lichterfelde Sud, a citylandscape on the southern edge of Berlin; ARU are the lead designers of the urban landscape of Paju Book City in Seoul, Korea an industrial estate for the publishing industry in South Korea; the YoulHwaDang Publishing House in Paju Book City, (ARU as joint architects with Kim Jong Kyu/MARU, Seoul); Jazz Café, Art Gallery and Private Residence at G-39 at the Heyri Art Valley, a new sustainable community near Seoul, Korea. (ARU as joint architects with Kim Jong Kyu/MARU, Seoul); the Positive Thinking People Publishing House in Paju Book City, (ARU as joint architects with Choi JongHoon/NiA, Seoul). Projects of Florian Beigel and the Architecture Research Unit have been exhibited internationally and published widely in international journals.


For information about the projects, design philosophy and publications, please visit the ARU website at

http://aru.londonmet.ac.uk

Positive Thinking People Publishing Company, Paju Book City, Korea. The building is composed of a main structure of reinforced concrete walls and floors with an external curtain wall of steel and brick. This gives an impression of a measured solidity. Photo: Jonathan Lovekin (May 2007)