Unit H
Inside out
Charlotte Harris, Keita Tajima
Unit H continued to investigate the city’s incomplete condition as a source of imagination, and its urban transformation as a drive for new architectural strategies. This year, we based our studies in Woolwich in south east London and working with the theme of “Inside Out”. Woolwich has a long history. It has undergone enormous change over the past centuries: from a small medieval Kentish town to a naval dockyard in the 16th century, it was also the site of the Royal Arsenal. Much of this historic grain has been slowly altered or demolished through ‘slum’ clearances and the introduction of rail and road infrastructures, and most recently, with the upcoming arrival of the Crossrail link, the city fabric, skyline and neighbourhoods are being rapidly transformed and replaced by new housing developments. The unit questions how the historic urban fabric can respond to growth and changing conditions, whilst also retaining a sense of character and permanence. The study area was focused on several continuous urban blocks stretching from the city to the waterfront along the Thames, where students were asked to pick one of the blocks to study further as the site for their main project. The projects have explored design proposals for a civic space for cultural production which acts as a radical adjustment to the wider urban block and provides a public face and home for the institution. The design proposals sought to offer a robust and generous architecture that house, enrich and express the daily life of their occupants and the wider city. Through the notion of “inside out” and with playful
WOOLWICH, LONDON, UK
and radical imaginations, students made a series of architectural proposals that negotiates and shifts the ambiguous boundary between interior and exterior, formal and informal, permanent and temporal. All the architectural proposals were founded on a sense of place - both drawing on the qualities of the past as well as providing for the present and anticipating the future of Woolwich. We’d like to thank all of our students who have been through a particularly difficult time and despite this have managed to deliver fantastic work this year, and to everyone who has supported Unit H.
