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The global pandemic has both increased our online distant connections whilst also making us all focus more on our immediate surroundings; we are drawn into questioning what a local, proximity city, might mean. The project draws on ideas of the ’15-minute’ city developed by Carlos Moreno, defined to create a ‘city of proximity’ in which you can either walk or cycle to fulfil six social functions of living, working, supplying, caring, learning, and enjoying within each individual city.
The project has two phases. In the first phase, students address their local area based on the concept of the ‘15-minute city’ and identify the special traits of that area, as well as what may be missing from a civic point of view. The second phase requires students to locate a small site and design a small building that address their reading of the area. The small building or piece of architecture will address the civic, imaginary, and a new speculative future.
Projects based in Wider London are featured here.
This semi-outdoor bouldering centre anchors itself along the last remaining wall of the Marshalsea Prison, breathing new life into a deserted park and derelict alleyway. The decision to bring leisure activities from outside the city into Central London was inspired by large-scale artificial landscapes in Craiova, Romania.
Sandwiched between council estates and millionaire rows, the programme responds to an architectural segregation that limits access to Regent's Park. The five elevated music practice rooms focus sound on a central atrium, encouraging locals to use the under croft as an auditorium, performance area, and passageway.
Responding to a 1 in 100 year flood event and the natural topography, the building changes according to the seasonal volumes of rainfall. Water is collected and channelled to create an informative journey that reconnects the local children with the risks of flooding and erosion, whilst using water usefully to wash their boots.
The project combines the programme of a funhouse and a mudlark club, sitting on the south shore of the Thames, next to the Battersea Park.
A textile art studio is situated opposite Hjem Kensington café, which closes off part of a quiet roundabout and formally creates a public space, with the knitted canopy overhead linking the two.
Scrap metal workshop with metalworking stages distributed across three floors. An architectural promenade inspired by serendipitous dead-end site encounter, metal mapping, and local clockmaking history.
Between a built-up street and a nature reserve, the project extends nature and provides a space for kids, parents, and residents to play and work within nature whilst also experiencing a sense of neighbourhood.
Aged steps progress up subtle gradients of carefully orchestrated encounters and exercises. Elderly people dancing their loneliness away; water channelling to feed greenery of surrounding gardens, thanking them for the safety and enclosure that they provide.
The site is on Deptford High Street, home to a successful and diverse market community. The building aims to provide a space for new market traders to start up their business and integrate into the community.
In response to East Ham’s furniture waste, the centre provides a personal and educational workshop for a carpenter who restores furniture and teaches local school students carpentry-based skills.
Situated in East London, Mudchute Farm. The project aids the progress of agriculture within cities by reconnecting visitors with the processes of farms. The buildings workspace produces the products that are sold on the retail floor.
The design hopes to cultivate a sense of community transforming the back lands and gardens of terraced houses in Islington to allotments and gathering social space. The structure runs through the perimeter of each garden to provide households on upper floors with growing outside space without taking away space from the garden below.