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Unit 07: Poetic Pragmatism IV: Refuge (or Gimme Shelter)

Unit brief

This year, the studio will explore, again through the lens of Poetic Pragmatism, how architecture can embody and facilitate refuge. Our investigations will address two distinct sites: the intersection of Plumbers Row and Mulberry Street in Whitechapel, London and the remote settlement of Shingle Street in Suffolk.

To begin the year, students will be asked to collectively scrutinize and translate a selection of domestic interiors, an exercise intended to encourage the careful examination of their spatial, tectonic and conceptual qualities. The precedents to be interrogated span continents and centuries, offering a variety of spatial settings, cultural manifestations and resulting atmospheres. Through drawing and model making, you will consider how careful observation can inform architecture in relation to atmosphere, materiality and use.

The design proposal for the first semester will be a project on a vacant site in Whitechapel for a night shelter and its supportive spaces that balances pragmatism and empathy, privacy and community, security and openness. Due to the compact nature of the site, you will be challenged with arranging the programme vertically, whilst maintaining the necessary connectivity between the primary and secondary spaces of the programme – a complex architectural task that requires both imagination and rigour.

Preceding this, you will be encouraged to develop an understanding of the urban context of Whitechapel, conducting drawn and modelled surveys of its land use, building types, transport links, street life, ecologies and its history.

In the second semester, attention will turn to Shingle Street, where students will be asked to pursue a programme that addresses ideas of retreat and rehabilitation. Analysis of the broader context at Shingle Street will include drawn and photographic surveys of the coastline, tidal patterns, its flora and fauna and the shifting ground conditions unique to this type of exposed landscape. This semester will culminate in a proposal for a building (and its territory) that supports recovery and renewal in a landscape of exposure and solitude.

Through this work, we will interrogate how architecture can respond to fundamental human needs for refuge and restoration. We will place close attention to material choices, construction methods and the practical realities of designing a building in both an urban setting and an exposed landscape, asking how architecture can quietly and confidently improve lives while working within real constraints. In doing so, we hope to demonstrate that care is embedded in the detailed decisions we make and how they impact upon the lives of those who use the spaces we create.

Sunlight streaming through partially open windows, casting shadows on a wooden sill

Photo credit: David Grandorge

Course
Tutors David Grandorge
Ted Swift 
Where Goulston Street
When Monday and Thursday

Architecture Postgraduate Studios

 
1/2
Architectural model showing a glass building beside a simpler structure with three detailed trees.

Unit 02 An Embassy in Regents Park

Tony Fretton David Owen

An embassy in an extensive enclosed garden in Regents Park, consisting of a chancellery, the workplace of the embassy and a residence.
Futuristic hillside with tiered homes, greenery, diverse buildings, tall trees, and a bright sky

Unit 04: Projected Topologies Living Together on the Edge of Time

Jonas Lundberg, Nate Kolbe

Projected Topologies is a speculative design studio exploring new forms of collective, off-grid living on a hilltop site in rural Greece. Students develop proto-architectural systems that fuse building and landscape, working collaboratively in first-person perspective through Minecraft, AI tools, drone scanning, and film. The studio projects design futures across 10, 50, 100, and 1000-year horizons, responding to the climate emergency with net-positive ecological ambitions.
People on colourful mats inside a low wooden library structure, in an outdoor festival setting

Unit 06: Festival City: Common Ground in Crisis

Dr Bo Tang, Robert Barnes and Shamoon Patwari

ARCSR Unit 6 (2025–26) explores the River Lea as a Living Lab for participatory architecture in response to climate emergency, post-industrial change, and social fragmentation. Students will work with local communities to design festivals, shared spaces, and ecological interventions, moving from micro-site prototypes to a collective Festival Framework. The year includes skills-based volunteering days and will conclude with a public event and exhibition of student work on the Lea.
Sunlight streaming through partially open windows, casting shadows on a wooden sill

Unit 07: Poetic Pragmatism IV: Refuge (or Gimme Shelter)

David Grandorge, Ted Swift

This year, the studio will explore, again through the lens of Poetic Pragmatism, how architecture can embody and facilitate refuge. Our investigations will address two distinct sites: the intersection of Plumbers Row and Mulberry Street in Whitechapel, London and the remote settlement of Shingle Street in Suffolk.
Hand-drawn sketch plan of a house with columns and courtyards

Unit 08: What Goes Up? Impermanence – Presence in Practice of Reuse

Takero Shimazaki, Jonathan Mortlock

This year, Unit 8 will explore the role of impermanence in architecture. The Unit will do so through an explicit focus on the process and production of drawings, in collaboration with Drawing Matter.
Impressionist-style landscape painting of a village with red-roofed houses set against a blue mountain backdrop

Unit 09: Small is Beautiful

Stephen Taylor, Han Wang

Drawing on Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (1973), Unit 9 explores designing simple, economic architectures within a small community at the Moulin de Croisance in the Cévennes National Park. Inspired by Cézanne’s modest hamlet in Meyreuil, where buildings share proportions and materials, we embrace locality and reuse. Our aim is to foster meaningful place and community through an evolving concept of “slow architecture.”