MA Architecture: Cities and Innovation

ma architecture: cities and innovation

maa

degree show central saint martins 23/6-28/6 2015

2

MA architecture: cities and innovation - degree show 2015

The New Mall

Young Women’s Mobility on Edgeware Road

Maintenance Picturesque

Industrious Neighbourhoods Legacy for Meanwhile Use

Artefacts in the Landscape

Contents 05

Introduction to MA Architecture: Cities and Innovation / Mel Dodd, Programme Director

06

Maintenance Picturesque / James Beadnall

10

Legacy for Meanwhile Use / Hajir Kheder

14

The New Mall / Ethan Liu

18

Young Women’s Mobility On Edgeware Road / Parastoo Mednejad

22

Industrious Neighbourhoods / Carlotta Novella

26

Artefacts in the Landscape / Mary Katherine Spence

30

Thanks to

Introduction to MAACI Architectural education is entering a profound period of flux. Colossal fee rises and the diminishing prospects for employment are now shining an interrogatory light on the traditional five-year full-time pathway. And in architectural practice, the boundaries of the discipline are expanding beyond building in inverse proportion to the shrinking role of the architect as lead consultant in large public projects.

Simultaneously architectural education is often accused of retreating from the constraints and conditions of the real world, inhabiting a world of ideas.

Spatial Practices, as an emerging discipline at Central St Martins, situates itself at this nexus – and offers an alternative for architectural and spatial education that addresses these imperatives. For us, architecture is not considered simply as a route to a profession. Our art and design context (based on a long tradition of the British art school) creates an environment in which students are encouraged to develop as individuals, through their own ideas, their own approaches and their own process. They are encouraged to situate themselves within a critical framework that questions the city and its social, political and economic structures of power and status quo. Yet as part of our emerging manifesto we also believe that we need to nurture relevant skills and knowledge to support the radical potential of building, not only the radical potential of ideas. We want to engage creatively with the reality of cities and their legislative and economic burdens, maintaining an external engagement with the city around us through partnerships with community and industry.

We are therefore extremely excited to be celebrating our new postgraduate students on the MA Architecture: Cities + Innovation, and the M ARCH Architecture (Part 2). Through innovative placement experiences, links with practice and industry, collaborations and part-time study, these students, and their incipient practices and projects, have already started to navigate diverse paths within, or outside of, the profession. They have tested design approaches which respond to the burgeoning need for city design to focus not only on the traditional ‘hard’ infrastructures of buildings, but also the softer infrastructures of social networks, organization and human interactions. We congratulate them and wish them well in the future!

Mel Dodd Programme Director Spatial Practices

6

MA architecture: cities and innovation - degree show 2015

Maintenance Picturesque James Beadnall

When patching up a deteriorating estate, can we

Supervisors Melanie Dodd Dominic Cullinan Collaborators Cheng-Ju, Chang (MA Narrative Environments)

This project strategy is derived primarily from a forensic narrative of material behaviour on-site and proposes to introduce new possibilities of site-works with a vision beyond short-term repair of its 1975 brick+grass status quo.

A triptych presents past present and future conditions of Peabody Hill. The blind cultures of maintenance and repairs are mutated by the new landscape strategy, using the existing materiality and infrastructure of site works to insert additional amenities throughout the estate which may otherwise be deemend excessive and never provided for.

The “Maintenance Picturesque” is a vision in which care is integrated into the landscape’s functionality, where residents might feel they have agency to occupy the estate as a whole rather than in isolation.

> cyclical repairs: Peabody Hill Estate since 1975 Thurlow Lodge 1795 Triptych 1795-2025-1975 >

Born from the Romantic 18th Century aesthetic culture of the picturesque, Knights Hill was first occupied by Thurlow Lodge. Landowners once overlooked this wellpostured Georgian mansion, whilst locals worked the farmland below.

Now the red-brick extrusions of Peabody Hill Estate are a patchwork of short-term repairs, locked in a material state of 1975. Currently life on-site is split between contracted facility work, obsessive lawn mowing and individual care of isolated fenced gardens.

propose more efficient and longterm repairs that enhance life on the estate, not simply sustain its raw functional materiality?

> >

“The Maintenance Picturesque” is a conceptual landscape strategy and housing provision in a suburban South London estate on Knights Hill.

This project is a re-programming of the aspirations, technologies and actions surrounding London’s housing plan, and a development on an inert history of cyclical deterioration and renewal of our built environment.

8

MA architecture: cities and innovation - degree show 2015

> Plan of woodland/estate threshold A landscape strategy for a new definition of site maintenance: toolshed follys provide residents with a new common ground whilst bonfire hearths and beekeeping zones establish a wilderness territory without landscape management schedules.

Meanwhile a handrail extends from new shared houses to become a wooded path wayfinder, child’s play area and exercise infrastructure, programming the estate with minimal interventions which secure a more tangible future for neglected landscapes.

10

MA architecture: cities and innovation - degree show 2015

Legacy for Meanwhile Use Hajir Kheder ‘Meanwhile’, ‘pop-up’, ‘temporary’ and ‘interim’ are terms that are commonly used to describe a mode of occupancy in cities and which are increasingly changing the way we view redevelopment. ‘Legacy for Meanwhile Use’ is a project exploring the capacity for temporary use to go on to embed and reinvent the development process as seen through the lens of the Canning Town Caravanserai and its position in and amongst the Hallsville Quarter Master Plan.

Through a close collaboration with Ash Sakula Architects and a series of conversations held with the site’s developer, the local authority as well as local residents in Canning Town, the outcome of these meetings provided a briefing framework for a new hybrid model to be developed. A set of ‘fragmentary moments’ are proposed across the Hallsville Quarter whereby Caravanserai processes collide with the master plan and in which new infrastructures are inserted to facilitate

Supervisors Melanie Dodd Alberto Duman Oscar Brito Collaborators Ash Sakula Architects Bouygues Development Newham Council

shared spaces for building, making, growing and events.

An anchor retail unit Morrisons Supermarket is reimagined as a place where shelving and storage units become active components of the shop floor, making staircases into a new ‘floating’ steel floor and which culminates into a podium garden above. Spaces of production, management, shopping and leisure co-exist in such a way as to eradicate the zoned condition which frequently constitutes masterplans.

Within the degree show, a set of tables and floor tape demarcate the blocks of the Hallsville Quarter scheme at 1:100 scale. The objects, models, and images presented on these furnitures depict the collaborative design process which has driven the project and celebrates the richness of the Caravanserai and it’s potential to imprint and maintain legacy within the future development in Canning Town.

MA architecture: cities and innovation - degree show 2015

> >

The Long Table at the Canning Town Caravanserai >

12

Model 1:100

> A new vision for Morrisons Supermarket

14

MA architecture: cities and innovation - degree show 2015

The New Mall Kuo-Hui, Liu (Ethan) In Croydon’s vision for 2020, the Croydon council plans to encourage local people to buy local foods and ingredients as well as to help grow local microbusinesses. However, almost all of the traders in Surrey Street Market import goods from outside of Croydon, from locations such as the Smithfield wholesale meat market and the New Covent Garden wholesale flower market.

According to a renting report from Croydon council published in 2014, more than half the town centre offices are empty. The vision for Ruskin Square is to create a new business, residential and leisure quarter in the centre of Croydon. It will comprise, in total, five Grade A office buildings of between seven to fifteen floors, which will provide up to 1,250,000 sq. ft. of new accommodation. Therefore, there is a significant contradiction within Croydon’s plans.

This project aims to alter the current plan for Ruskin Square in East Croydon for one to three floors of offices to an open local market. This will provide local communities with a space for trade and leisure. This market will be a public space that facilitates the purchase of local products and goods. This is strategy intends to reduce the demand for food from outside Croydon, further encouraging the establishment of small local enterprises.

This design allows for a social value in Ruskin Square whereby traders meet the needs for goods, services, works and utilities in a way that achieves value for money on a everyday basis, generating benefits to society and the economy while minimizing idle space and damage to the natural environment.

Supervisors Melanie Dodd Liza Fior Collaborators muf architecture / art Honoré Van Rijswijk (FRONTWORK) Tasi-Chieh, Lin (BA textile design) Cheng-Ju, Chang (MA Narrative Environments)

> Proposal for Ruskin Square

18

MA architecture: cities and innovation - degree show 2015

Young Women’s Mobility On Edgeware Road Parastoo Mednejad The project seeks to explore and reconsider neighbourhoods in which the dominance of men over women has been written into the design and occupation of space. Edgware Road is a cosmopolitan High Street, settled in earnest since the 1970’s by a largely Middle Eastern community.

In the context of the Edgware Road neighbourhood, the project seeks to advocate for the presence of women in the city, their need for childcare, for community facilities; for safety; for the right to occupy public space, day and night.

‘Internationally migration is not an invention of the late twentieth century, nor even of modernity in its twin guises of capitalism and colonialism... ‘ , ‘The result is postmodern cities and regions of extraordinary cultural diversity and the attendant problems of living together in one society for ethnic groups with diverse cultures and social practices’ Leonie Sandercock

In this project I tried to test some of my lines of enquiry, initially, through my own experience of life in Tehran as a woman. I seek to explore and identify the visible, invisible, and subversive factors that may affect women’s relationships to the socio-spatial spheres they are living in, with regards to their social backgrounds, nationality and ethnic background.

Women Mobility on Edgware Road proposes a network of interventions aimed to facilitate the re-appropriation of public space by women.

The project addresses two locations, the first being Church Street Library with the addition of a community kitchen, a communal room for mothers and a mobile classroom. The second being Edgware Road Station/ Bakerloo Line providing facilities for breast feeding and a public toilet equipped with a nursery room.

Supervisors Nasser Golzari Rosamund Diamond Collaborators Yara Sharif Church Street Library Bahbak Hashemi-Nezhad

> the transparent veil

Is the veil a form of empowerment?

Is the veil, or any kind of specific clothing, a form of identity for individuals?

How specific is the veil to women?

Is the veil or hijab, as seen within islamic culture, gender specific?

How much does one lose and gain by the use of this What does one gain or lose through the use of this device as a form of empowerment or identity?

M.O.P3 Existing playground and new roof light

> Site 2 Giving local women a chance to be part of the economic intervention on their local market, by providing community kitchen facilities, with regards to existing potential collaborator such as Westminster Adult Centre, and Westminster Food bank.

< Site 1 The breast feeding space and public toilet equipped with a nursery room, located in between of two different characterestics of the site.

22

MA architecture: cities and innovation - degree show 2015

Industrious neighbourhoods Carlotta Novella Home-based work is a well becoming increasingly difficult, the established and accessible working project explores possibilities for flexpractice that offers many social ible spaces that combine both work and economic benefits but as an and dwelling, providing alternative architectural category it has not pre- scenarios to the current models that viously been investigated. Despite rely on renting studios and subscribthe number of people working from ing for workshop desk space. home increasing year on year, current government and local authority The proposal presents an upgradpolicies appear unclear and contraing of the home and the neighbourdictory in relation to social tenants hood for multiple types of light setting up businesses in their homes. industrial, semi-professional and Design for home-based workers and professional services and practices. their community, especially for social This is mainly done via the improvehousing tenants, is therefore a live ment of existing local networks and policy issue. resident facilities, which represent the backbone of the local commuThe Industrious Neighbournity. hood is a space where homebased workers are enabled to use The introduction of tactical and existing public facilities, to create strategic design interventions will new self-sustaining and sociable help residents interested in working, practices by working together. The making and producing from home. project is an urban strategy to supThey gain a new set of tools to port the introduction and facilitation greater empower their work, their of home-based businesses within day-to-day lives and the community a housing estate in London. With they live in. access to affordable workspace

Supervisors Melanie Dodd Andreas Lang

>

further proposals for an industrious neighbourhood within Old Ford >

>

Collaborators public works Circle Housing Old Ford CTC Old Ford Órfhlaith Ní Mhórda

> proposal for rooftop extension above Wright’s Community Centre providing communal co-working spaces for homebased workers

Wick Session #24 in CSM

• in the uk currently there are 2.9 million home-based businesses which contribute

£300 billion to the

economy.

• in 2010 the uk coalition government pledged to lift the ban on residents of social housing working from their homes.

• in 2010 research suggested that as many as

96 per cent of housing associations

require tenants to get written permission to be able to work from home

- with many tenants

believing that permission would be denied. while more than

11 per cent of homeowners

work mainly from home, the figure can be as low as five per cent of council tenants.

• in 2012 the government introduced the under- occupancy penalty, most commonly known as the bedroom tax, which promised to seriously affect the so called

“spare bedroom businesses”.

• in 2014 the government revealed that social housing tenants could avoid to pay the bedroom tax by using their spare room to set up a business. however tenants would first need to get permission from landlords, their council or housing association, which in most cases still be denied due to umcompromising space standards, allocations policies and tenancy agreements.

(source: enterprise nation report and gov.uk).

26

MA architecture: cities and innovation - degree show 2015

Artefacts in the Landscape Mary Katherine Spence Cemeteries as Obstruction and Invitation in London’s Green Belt Could London’s expansion be informed through a re-engagement with the landscapes of burial? What if in planning for death we could contemplate the future of our city? “...very few people in contemporary society have a continuous physical knowledge of moving from the urban to the rural.” - Will Self 46,000 die in London per year. To meet needs until 2031, space for 132,000 internments is anticipated but currently unprovided for. What if cemeteries were considered as infrastructure necessary to the city, and could be places for the living alongside the dead? Cemeteries are proposed for insertion into the frontiers London’s Green Belt, to both maintain characteristics of ‘openness and permanence’ whilst encouraging access and use into this under-explored territory.

A constellation of objects stages a series of quiet encounters along the edges of the Green Belt. A

magnified policy paper outlines the case and methods for the instigation of new cemeteries, proposing a third way outside of the aims of conservation lobbyists and house builders.

Positioned alongside are site-specific records, actions and physical interventions which pull into question the validity of such immutable objects and seeks to open up the modes of operation and objects through which we can communicate and influence policy on the ground.

A smock displays the territory in question bringing the large scale strategy within a small scale artefact.

It performs as a prop within the film, moving through the landscape it projects. Films orbit the policy line, slowly revealing the topographies, development and ecologies which define this edge. A series of tiles replays and ingrains wording from policy alongside chance conversations, evoking a reassertion of the ground plane as a territory worthy of attention.

Supervisors Melanie Dodd Rebecca Ross Finn Williams Collaborators Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park Shuffle Film Festival

> still from greenbelt 360 > still from cemeteries compendium

Gre

en

t

Bel

28

MA architecture: cities and innovation - degree show 2015

artefact type: plague stone material: carved stone location: across UK date: introduced in the 17th Century The plague stone was a vessel into which vinegar was poured, serving as holder to disinfect monies exchanged during the Black Death. Trade and charity was enabled through these objects, acting as a marker in the landscape for a moment suspended. Strategically placed at crossroads between afflicted villages. Many remain at junctions throughout the UK, their materiality betraying their age.

Their original purpose unpracticed for 400 years now forgotten, mostly unmarked, these useful objects have either melted into the streetscapes of expanding town, or serve as furnitures and markers in the landscape.

>

Furnitures in the landscape > Detail of fabric of the policy smock Cemetery walk at the Green Belt edge

>

20

m inside the green belt

10

m inside the green belt

GREEN BELT

10

m outside the green belt

20

m outside the green belt

30

m outside the green belt

30

MA architecture: cities and innovation - degree show 2015

Thanks to

Albane Duvillier Alberto Duman Andrew Porter from OurBow Angela Hartley from The Stitch Anna Hart Anthony Powis Ash Sakula Architects Bahbak Hasheminezhad Bianca Correa Cany Ash Canning Town Design Forum Group Charmain and Rick from the CTC Old Ford Church Street Library Crossbones Cemetery and Garden Croydon Council Market Services Kim Trogal Elim Full Gospel Chinese Church Farida Al-husseini Finn Williams Fran Edgerley Gemma Holyoak Gigi Giannella Glenn Jenkins Greater London Authority Regeneration and Culture Teams Guerrino Lovato Honore van Rijswijk Irene De Lorenzis James Collier James Meek Jessica Hadwin Joseph Hamblin Julia Rolf, Greenacres Burial Park Julian Lewis Karen Martin from Makerhood Kate MacTiernan Kathy Waghorn Keith Smith

Ken Greenway Liza Fior Lizzy Daish London Chinatown Community Centre Maria Lisogorskaya Mark Byfield Massimo, Andrea, Michele and the other Italian home-based producers Matt Leung Mel Dodd Morgan Lewis Nasser Golzari Oscar Brito OWL Patrick Quinn Rebecca Ross Richard Fagg Rosamund Diamond Shamoon Patwari Shin Nakano Shuffle Film Festival Sinead Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Moore Surry street market The Mosaic Community Trust Thomas Jackson Tom Maher and Katie from Butley Court Community Centre Torange Khonsari from public works Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park Tower Hamlets Council Market Services Transport For London Westminster Council White Label Consultants, Croydon Yara Sharif all the 3D large workshop technicians and everyone else who has contributed to this course

MA Architecture Cities and Innovation 2013-2015 Granary Building 1 Granary Square London N1C 4AA +44 2075 147022 info@csm.arts.ac.uk

MA Narrative Environments 2013 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 2015 GRANARY BUILDING 1 GRANARY SQUARE LONDON N1C 4AA +44 2075 147022 info@csm.arts.ac.uk