Studio 04: 'Modern Life is Rubbish', Salvaging a Meaningful Architecture of the Everyday

Studio 04

Year Two, University of Cambridge, 2021–22 ‘Modern Life is Rubbish’: Salvaging a Meaningful Architecture of the Everyday

It was a special year.

A pair of tutors new to teaching together, and new to Cambridge; a group of students who spent their first year trapped in bedrooms; working from a strange (and rather charming) social club building soon to be demolished: a lot could have gone wrong — and sometimes, it did!

And yet, the past year has seen us all find, test, and refine our own languages of architectural reading, critique, and design. The variety of ideas, forms, themes, communities, references, and representations you see in this little booklet — from the micro-scale of paving slabs to macro-scale infrastructural networks of care, agriculture, and transportation — are testament to the confidence each of us has developed to follow our noses, ask difficult questions, seek advice, and work with space from a position of passion and optimism.

Challenging, yet compassionate; rigorous, yet sensitive; excitingly independent, yet always collaborative: a lot seemed to go right, too.

Through a year of trusting friendships and attentive questioning, we hope that, together, Studio Four has opened a door to an emerging form of architectural education we will all take with us, and pass onwards, for a very long time.

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Studio 04 is Laxmi Isabella Andrews Reuben J. Brown Leila Drew Sajda Al Haj Hamad Cody Knight Shailaja Maheetharan Romy Pfeifer Love Raitio Euan Russell Anu Sofuyi Grace Wardle Solano Blanka Valcsicsák & Francesca Romana Dell’Aglio Rory Sherlock

Valued Friends & Critics Barbara Campbell-Lange, Victoria Easton, Liza Fior, David Knight, Jon Lopez, Maria Paez Gonzalez, Klaus Platzgummer, Edward Powe, Davide Sacconi, Ingrid Shr�der, Marco Veneri, Manijeh Verghese 4

Contents 6–7

‘Modern Life is Rubbish’ 8–11

The Grafton Centre: Collective Research Students’ Works 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 44 48 52 56

Laxmi Reuben Leila Sajda Cody Shailaja Romy Love Euan Anu Grace Blanka

laxmiandrews@icloud.com instagram.com/reubenj.brown lrdrew10@gmail.com sa2020@cam.ac.uk ck592@cam.ac.uk smahee4@yahoo.co.uk rep62@cam.ac.uk lr527@cam.ac.uk euanrussell222@gmail.com aos30@cam.ac.uk gcew2@cam.ac.uk bv306@cam.ac.uk

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‘Not Masterplanning’

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‘Modern Life is Rubbish’: Salvaging a Meaningful Architecture of the Everyday

Daily life mostly takes place in secular buildings generally omitted from the definition of ‘Architecture’ with a capital ‘A’, the canon of buildings and projects which form the backbone of architectural study, research and criticism. Studio Four attempts to engage directly with the banal components of the city that tend to fly under the radar — the supermarkets, car parks, shops, gyms, hospitals, etc. that frame the mundane reality of normal, day-to-day existence, and operate as the containers for, and mirrors of, the large majority of people in the U.K. today.

The focus of our investigations this year was The Grafton Centre, a shopping mall at the eastern periphery of Cambridge. Together we have produced a collective body of knowledge about the site, its surroundings, and its significance within the city as a whole.

The building is not of any particular architectural merit; nor is it a measurable success. It was a contested and unpopular intervention at the time of its construction, and less than four decades since being finished it is due for imminent sale for reconfiguration into something as-yet unknown.

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Our research developed in three phases, growing from an initial phase of ethnographic analysis and pragmatic documentation. First we looked at ways to harness the existing structure through adaptive reuse. We then turned our attention to the form and material qualities of the building itself, before ending with the production of a series of individual projects and strategies through which each student was able to integrate their diverse strands of research into an urban-scale intervention within the city The aim of this work was to collectively produce a varied and overlapping series of well-designed spaces within which life can happen; to develop a sensitivity towards that which is typically overlooked; to find without prejudice the value that lies dormant in and around even the most banal, or dysfunctional, of built structures; to harness friction, contestation, and granular, bottom-up interventions knitting together communities through spatial action; to salvage a meaningful architecture of the everyday.

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The Grafton Centre: Collective Research

As much as this year has been about our individual design projects found in the following pages, it has also been about building a collective body of knowledge and understanding of a particular site in Cambridge.

The Grafton Centre is a retail fortress first proposed by the 1950 Holford-Wright Report on the planning of Cambridge, and constructed in the 1980s. Investigating its history we found letters sent from a local councillor to Michael Heseltine (Thatcher’s Right-toBuy hawk) seeking to overturn the Community Planning Act in order to force through the centre’s planning proposal; and a pantomime script aimed squarely at that councillor written by a resident of the blighted neighbourhood the Centre was imposed upon, the Kite.

But through maps of images called Atlases (after Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas) used throughout the year, we have also faced the Grafton through the lenses of (among others) mall culture, architectural form, refuse, infrastructure, economics, always with a close anthropological approach.

On the following pages is a segment of one of these atlases, produced at the end of this year. Here, contextual artefacts and observations are placed alongside our own proposals for the Centre: an accretion of research and responses from throughout the year.

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Laxmi Isabella Andrews

The Fold

The private-public interior thoroughfare of the Grafton Centre is policed by ‘Hosts’. Certain ‘normative’ behaviours are allowed, and favourable; others are not. The realm of this authority stretches to the Centre’s outer walls: three-storeys of unfenestrated brick, fortresslike.

But, while the Grafton’s walls are not glazed, they do, at times, fold: into service doors and vents, forming niches. Here, un-surveilled, a little life is found, independent of the commercial activities within.

A liminal realm emerges, strewn with the discarded materials from which we have built this exhibition.

In my proposition, each niche becomes the generator of its own fractal plan, excavating into the leasable area of the Grafton.

Previously incidental, these tectonic forms have been sampled, repeated, and appropriated, to make the Grafton Centre’s hostile external walls habitable.

There is no defined programme for the resulting spaces. Rather, they open a latency in the Grafton’s rigidity: counterproposals for how the centre may be used, whether as a space to rest, eat, find shelter.

Beginning with a recess in a wall, the niches become a civic gesture, suggesting a form of generosity towards an undervalued public realm.

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Reuben J. Brown

An Architecture of Time It is difficult to imagine the 1980s designers of the Grafton Centre giving any consideration to how the building might be used should its status as a shopping mall be jeopardised. 40 years on, the site is in an uncertain purgatory, likely requiring an overhaul as radical and violent as the Centre’s original imposition 40 years ago.

Hannah Arendt described this utilitarian condition as the ‘unending chain of means and ends which never arrives at some principle that could justify the category, that is, utility itself.’ And so we are left with ‘meaninglessness in the midst of usefulness’.

How do we avoid such an interminable chain? This year I have sought a philosophy of architectural meaning drawn not from the matter of space, but from time.

A choreography for the Grafton Centre’s demolition created a temporary performance from material destruction to define a new spatial permanence.

In a bridge for a tram network to ameliorate the city’s congestion, made worse by the same 1950 planning document responsible for the Grafton Centre, Saint Augustine’s philosophy of memory was developed into a consideration of infrastructure as human-made geology: an architecture of time.

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Leila Drew

The People’s Courtyard Cambridge restricts its residents’ potential for connection to the land and to each other. Near the Grafton Centre, this has manifested notably in the effects of the Enclosures Act (1811); a compulsory purchase order of workers’ cottages in the 1970s; and the construction of the Grafton itself in the 1980s, which flattened a blighted neighbourhood of terraced homes called the Kite. In 2008 cows were introduced to Midsummer Common as a way to prevent alleged ‘misuse’ and ‘anti-social behaviour’.

Under capitalism, land and food have become commodities. By making meals and eating together, we can form networks of care, and common the means of growing and eating once again. Like reclaiming land, nourishing our bodies becomes an act of rebellion.

From an existing patchwork of volunteer-run food banks, community kitchens, commons, and allotments, this project seeks to create a network of growing and eating throughout the city.

At its core, a central storage and distribution centre for dry and fresh produce has been created from an existing unit in the Grafton Centre, allowing a city-wide network to emerge. The shop unit’s roof has been reconfigured, allowing a food hub and common growing space to be set within a courtyard, speaking of an inward-looking care.

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Sajda Al Haj Hamad

Urban Green Belt Like many large-scale commercial developments, the Grafton Centre interacts with green space in a scattered and disinterested manner: a segment of verge beside a dual carriageway used by defecating dogs; an overgrown bush at the back of a car park; a bit of ornamental grass mediating a junction between infrastructural space and retail space; a tree whose planning permissions took two years to process.

In response, my project recognises the civic value and meaning of well-tended public greenery, seeking to activate and connect the existing unintentional islands of grass and shrubbery as parts of a greater human-ecological network in Cambridge.

Architecturally, this network is grounded in a bird tower, pergola, and small gardening workshop, which facilitate alternative imaginaries for the use and value of urban green spaces. Realised through an iterative process of model-making, the three interventions share a coherent design language, each drawing from a toolkit of building components facilitating ecological, structural, and aesthetic roles.

Alone, these structures are intriguing, perhaps delightful, landmarks in the city. Together, they speak of a wider strategy of urban greening and ecology formed with intention and care.

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Cody Knight

‘This Place was Empty, Now it’s our Stage!’

Fundamental principles of peaceful protest include: physical occupation, passive resistance, artistic improvisation, and of course, parties — Gideon Mendel.

The new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 increases police powers, and criminalizes certain forms of protest in almost all public or infrastructural spaces; but, crucially, neglects to legislate against spaces not used for these purposes, I.E. vacant spaces. This loophole offers the opportunity for protest without penalty.

If we assume the premise that protest is harder to discredit and dismiss if it occurs legally, how might architects facilitate political resistance by adapting disused buildings?

By constructing what at first appears to be a legitimate structure from around such a vacant building with scaffold, this project creates a space of occupation and community. Hiding in plain sight until impossible to ignore, the structure’s true purpose can then be quickly revealed, drawing open the curtains to a performance, amplifying the impact as an act of revelation.

Near the Grafton Centre, around Cambridge, and across the U.K., similar vacant buildings can be found, highlighting the potential for a reproducible methodology and platform of resistance.

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Shailaja Maheetharan

In Sight, In Mind Upon studying existing interventions that tackle homelessness in Cambridge, a missed connection can be clearly identified between the fixed nature of services and shelters on the outskirts of the city centre and the itinerant community they seek to serve.

My project aims to resolve this misalignment by placing a homelessness intervention hub at the centre of the city. Sited across a series of currently vacant retail units in an identified area of heavy footfall among the homeless population, the hub’s reach will be extended through semi-portable units stationed around the area, functioning as mobile clinics to offer first-aid and health advice.

This arrangement follows the principle that an intervention for the homeless population should be tailored to that community’s daily liturgies and habits, rather than interrupt them. It is hoped that such an approach would increase the chances of successful interaction with the services.

As well as decomposing the design hierarchy in this way, the project aims to dissolve the spatial notion of segregation between institution, volunteers, and customers, instead seeking a holistic intervention strategy which uses a series of smaller spaces where the needs of all are met simultaneously.

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Romy Pfeifer

‘Please Identify Yourself’ In Cambridge, where the division between town and gown is compounded upon socio-economic segregation, finding relation to place that holds both the capacity to change and the reliability of permanence is difficult. As such, the spaces against which we may define our identities become limited to our private homes.

The parts in-between are often more infrastructural than social, leaving little dedicated space for relating to one another and expressing ourselves outside of commerce.

My proposal looks to bridge an existing gap between night-time and day-time activities in Cambridge to offer an opportunity of connection to place. Built from the existing frames of two rows of garages near the Grafton Centre, the intervention might work as a public park, open to anyone at any time of day, while still providing insulated indoor spaces.

The design draws from a series of successful precedents from the last two centuries: a range of energetic social hubs, cabarets and clubs where people defined iconic cultures within architectural frames.

From this, the proposal offers an armature for a collective experience of space, which balances the capacity for change with the necessity of permanence in an ever-changing city.

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Love Raitio

Self-Making Architectures In public space, an immeasurable number of processes and actions continually create and define their own spatial contexts. The movement and idleness of people and objects; traces of their labour, ownership and waste, create and recreate an architecture long after any formal structure is built. Some of these space-making liturgies are celebrated in contemporary public design; others are hidden.

But by examining and revealing these traces in space we discover certain truths left otherwise undocumented by bureaucratic drawings, photographs, and texts. It’s in how the bins are arranged; how the debris sits on the ground; how the vehicles are parked on the patchedover asphalt — it’s there we find the stories of space being used, not in an architecture’s formal boundaries, but festered and sedimented into it through everyday use.

No architecture can be perfect; and I don’t believe that architecture’s purpose is to make space. Rather, it is to speak in dialogue with the space-making actions that inhabit it.

Through projects around the Grafton Centre including a public toilet, a rest stop for truckers, and a vitrine for maintenance, I have tried this year to make architecture that speaks and listens to these liturgies with honesty.

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Euan Russell

In-Between The city is always in-between; constantly changing and coming into being. My practice takes place in this condition, considering how we can act within and upon the places we inhabit.

The project is a series of actions taken in Cambridge’s ‘Areas of Major Change’. Each uses anti-climb fences in alternative ways. The first two were conducted out-of-hours on a construction site: turning a fence on its side and suspending it using rope and blocks.

The second two happened near the Grafton Centre. First, a fence was walked across a road, leading to a meeting with a family that would never have taken place otherwise. The fence was moved to a site which was once houses and will soon be a hotel. I gathered my friends and we suspended the fence from the edges of the site. It stayed there for a few weeks before someone untied it and threw it over the boundary. There is no single author to this work.

These actions are more about how people come together than any architectural object which might result. Mainly they’re looking for connection and humanity where it seems it can’t be found.

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Anu Sofuyi

The Peripheral Commons What could it mean to dilute boundaries between formal residential typologies and collective activities that intersect and overlap at the peripheries of the Grafton retail fortress?

By integrating residential space and industrial economies, ‘The Peripheral Commons’ seeks to expand the notion of commoning beyond agricultural production.

The project makes space for forms of resistance already emerging at the fringes of the Grafton area. By creating an alternative network of workshop microeconomies, the commons facilitate everyday theatricality and common ownership in materials and space. The component language of the site consists of movable and modular systems to institute an independent means of production.

The Peripheral Commons is sustained by commoners: local residents, craftspeople and designers, co-working, learning and teaching. This project aims to reinvigorate the neighbourhood by engaging in citizen participation: encouraging a culture of shared knowledge and skills, and restructuring local democracy by giving agency back to commoners.

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Grace Wardle Solano

Leisurely Place As a shopping centre, the Grafton Centre is increasingly weary. A third of its retail floorspace is vacant, and its owners are seeking (and struggling) to sell the site. But retail is not the Grafton’s only function. Its foodcourt, gym, and cinema remain well-liked and well-used destinations for Cambridge’s local population. Serviced by a 1100-space multi-storey car park, these facilities attract visitors from across the region.

As the Grafton Centre looks towards a large-scale reinvention, it is my proposal that the site doubles-down on these leisure activities, using existing structures where possible, and opening new civic spaces by selectively demolishing the building’s monolithic form.

The plan offers a new swimming pool, running track, football pitches, and tennis courts, all wrapped around a playscape for young children to teenagers. A close attention to landscaping materials, and international design precedents has directed the design, intended to be an exciting, joyful location in the city.

Where Cambridge’s university members receive plentiful facilities for leisure and sport, its local communities are less well-served. This reinvention of the Grafton corrects that imbalance.

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Blanka Valcsicsák

Living Together The Grafton Centre is surrounded by a variety of historical terrace houses, and new micro-flat housing developments. It’s a domestic landscape which lacks identity, and fails to respond to the diversity of society. This context calls for a new approach to housing, which carries greater care towards the subject and scale of its architecture; because the housing crisis is not only a crisis of scarcity and affordability, but also of ideology.

My proposal challenges ideas of domesticity and private ownership to imagine a spatial framework that allows new ways of living together to foster forms of solidarity and trust. By refusing to be dictated by economic transactions and exploitation, it is an architecture that instead finds meaning and value in social reciprocity, mutual aid and emancipation.

In this house, there are no corridors; the rooms are not assigned rigid functions; and walls become more ephemeral. The spatial conditions that emerge blur the boundaries between work, domestic labour, socialisation, rest, and exchange, creating a space where the individual burdens of cleaning, cooking, and childcare are shared.

This way of living is not meant for everyone, and might come with frictions. But are these frictions really something we should avoid?

Through them, the house might lose its symbolic meaning as an individual place of shelter, refuge and comfort; and become instead a place of collective rituals.

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‘Not Masterplanning’: an Urban-Strategy Workshop.

At architecture school, the end of the academic year happens at review. Individually, we present our work and receive our grades. But two days before our presentations, Studio Four was joined by David Knight & Edward Powe from dk-cm to pull these individual projects into one collective proposal for the Grafton Centre.

We were asked to present our current projects with just two minutes and a single image — but with a twist. Just before presenting, it was revealed that we would not be describing our own projects, but each others’. Then, with a 1:250 plan of the Grafton tiled on our studio wall, we entered a scrappy day of tracing paper and paint pens: keying into the site our boldest gestures and ideas, as David and Eddie asked us to ignore one another’s projects and push our individual programmes, with the view that we would seek to resolve the contested parts later.

But here we had our own surprise. In a year of working alongside each other, investing in each other’s ideas, and contributing to each others’ projects, we couldn’t help but find the spaces our propositions could share; the volumes they could each use, and how those uses would work together.

Throughout this year we have each struggled with the colossal scale of this site; tackling chunks of it at a time. But at the day’s end, we stepped back from a wall covered in multi-colour lines, drawn across each other on imbricating sheets of torn trace, and saw — if not a totally viable proposal — a rich, diverse, exciting, neighbourly, and dynamic opening gesture towards a new neighbourhood.

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A neighbourhood with a theatre, and civic courtyards; a working garden, and community kitchen; a tower for birds, and a little stream; houses for the young and the old, and a really great public toilet; a stop for a tram, and an in-between scrap left for someone else to fill.

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How does caring, sensitive, beautiful architecture come about? A ‘meaningful architecture of the everyday’, which looks beyond the confines of private property, statement buildings, righteous masterplans, demolish-to-rebuild; and beyond the confines of architectural education, limited in its grading of individually-produced projects, never to be realised? One might look towards a place where, asked to ignore our friends’ ideas even as they’re put to page, we see instead the thing in front us: their value, brightness, perspective, art, sensitivity, humour, elegance, and depth; gaps, and failures, and problems all.

Not the world of one or the other, but the one of and this, too.

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