Blanka bv306@cam.ac.uk

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.

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.

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.

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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