PG Architecture Unit 09: Convivial City

Unit brief

This year Unit 9 will base its projects in London and focus its programmes to address the inequality of housing provision towards young people and key workers. We will be discussing the qualities of ‘home’; what it is to live in the city, often in close proximity to others. We will be thinking about what defines a neighbourhood and of how spatial relationships play out across the thresholds between public and private space / the collective and the individual. We will study the physical parameters of streets and courts, thinking about how light and shadow fall upon built form and the colour and texture of their surfaces.

Live project: A Small House

Our first semester programme will be a live project working with the Mayor of London and the London Borough of Hackney. Students will design a small single-person house to be fabricated in timber, constructed off-site and configured in a manner to form terraces or other urban arrangements, laid out on temporary sites. This project will constitute a ‘meanwhile use’ for Hackney’s land that is awaiting longer term development.

Learning from Paris, Courts & the Cité

Our second semester project will examine back of high street sites and consider how their redevelopment can be a positive force in re-charging London’s historic high streets. In search of ideas towards this end we will visit Paris and study selected models of collective urban dwelling and look at how they form the make-up of a mixed, diverse and convivial city.

A passage into a Parisian courtyard is framed by sculptural facades

Details

Course
Tutors Stephen Taylor
Giles Townshend
Han Wang
Where Goulston Street
When Monday and Thursday

Architecture Postgraduate Studios

 
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