2022 – The Living Laboratory

The Everyday

a festival of the mundane

During his lifetime the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer completed around 50 paintings of which 35 survive today. Most of the paintings depict domestic scenes. It is remarkable that 19 were painted in the same room, showing often the same people. The scenes involve normal people doing ordinary things. But looking closer each element has been carefully chosen, playing a predetermined part in an everyday story. The real subjects of Vermeer’s paintings are not the characters depicted; it is the everyday space, the light, the materiality. Being ‘mundane’ is usually not a compliment, it’s seen to be dull, lacking interest or excitement.

2021/2022 PG13 explored the ‘Everyday’ – looking in detail at how we live together and inhabit space, the routines informing architectures. The Everyday doesn’t need to be boring, it is you who must elevate it to greatness using imagination and innovation.

Thomas Smith, Year 5, PG13, 2022

Thomas Smith, Year 5

Descending Water

Moving to London from the leafy New Forest coastline, my visits to the Highgate ponds have become a weekly necessity. An escape from the city where I purge myself of trivial woes. Soothing a mind and body that yearns for the untamed nature of its childhood.

Water’s ephemeral properties awaken the senses. With our tribal uniforms removed, we expose oneself, releasing barriers between us and nature. Only In this raw state can we truly tap into our primal and physiological needs, improving our health and well-being. As an active participant in the culture of the ponds, I understand the social and health opportunities that bathing and their communities provide.

My motivations for the project are to draw this culture and natural environment down from the Highgate ponds into the city, inserting water infrastructure along the water catchment of the lost River Fleet. A series of landscape installations and city interventions will form a journey of interconnected bathing spots through the city, altering the site hydrology whilst offering new opportunities for inhabitation, such as bathing. To achieve this goal, we must advocate for water-sensitive design strategies that create healthy water environments, whilst exploring the experiential variances of water typologies and their states.

Thabiso Nyezi, Year 5, PG13, 2022

Thabiso Nyezi, Year 5, PG13, 2022

The Promised Land

Negotiating new settlement patterns of representation informed by an ethnic migrant culture.

Migration has existed for decades, whether it was the rural English communities during the 19th century, missionary travels to Africa during colonization, or the current wave of refugees that are fleeing war or environmental catastrophes. The reasons vary but human beings throughout history have always been migrating and the evidence is observed through their cultural settlement patterns. The value of culture is the way that we see ourselves and our place in the world; it is how we live our lives and how we appreciate and understand the lives of others.

Many of us migrants (first/second-generation immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and/or expatriates) from African, Asian, and Middle Eastern communities living in the UK understand that home’ is a relative phenomenon. Our homelands are evident in our everyday cultural practices and possessions. However, we are limited to the intimate spaces we inhabit that become spaces of escapism and an extension of our identities. The UK has seen an exponential growth of BAME (Black, Asian, and minority ethnic) populations in New UK Towns evident through contested spaces of ownership such as mixed-use urban stores (corner shops) that play vital roles in ethnic migrants’ cultural and social mobility.

“The Promised Land is a speculative strategy that explores how a city/town such as Milton Keynes with this growing population could respond to cultural integration by harnessing the transformational power of culture in all its forms. How could the negotiation of different vernaculars redefine our relationship with the urban city? Drawing on the original Milton Keynes 1970’s vision of a “City in the Forest” in rural Buckinghamshire. The project imagines how elements of ethnic culture could be celebrated beyond intimate spaces into the built

form while addressing Milton Keynes urban ambitions. A town that celebrates rather than resists transcultural exchanges and envisions them as important to the town’s evolving everyday culture. A town that dares to be characterised by its existing and future inhabitants.

Callum Richardson, Year 5, PG13, 2022

Callum Richardson, Year 5

MINISTRY OF THE INVESTITABLE

The ministry of the inevitable is a speculative building that aims to inspire greater participation in the environment from those making the decisions. The ministry is not a place for high tech research but instead intends to invoke an emotional call for action where experience, information, and collective education inform and contribute to policy. Our climates are fragile and ever changing as we enter the age of the Anthropocene, our effect of the landscape is increasing exponentially. Yet our policies, decisions and societies continuously have a disconnect with the environment. A substantial barrier to broader implementation of climate change-related policies is perception. For too long it has been seen as an issue which only affects the global south, the project aims to challenge this and will look at the United Kingdom, more specifically Thanet island.

Much like our own environment, the building is not static but rather a decade long performance whose continuation is symbolic of our failures to solve the ever-growing climate emergency. The architecture reacts dynamically to the landscape. As time goes in the building decays and moves across the landscape. The project becomes investigative narrative of our ever-changing landscapes. Its legacy is one of collective failure, a call to action if not too late.

Chenwei Ye, Year 5, PG13, 2022

Chenwei Ye, The Tea Parliament in Hangzhou, Year 5, PG13, 2022

The project proposes a community forest landscape for locals to co-inhabit and preserve, whilst using architecture as a vehicle to accommodate forest events in order to re-establish the aesthetic and philosophy of ‘being in the forest’. Central to the ambitions of the project is the aim to question current non-interventionism models of forest preservation in the Longjing region in Hangzhou. This attitude towards forest management can be traced back to the government’s propagandistic ambition since the 1950s and consequentially generated a series of strict regulations that restricts local tea farmers’ rights and tradition to inhabit, exploit and co-exist with the forest. The architecture comes as a part of the new community forest

Ernest Chin, Year 5, PG13, 2022

Ernest Chin, Year 5

Margate Place-holder

The project asks: what if regeneration strategies placed locals at the core of their interventions? A speculative response to the Margate Town Investment Plan 2020 and Margate Town Deal 2021, the project seeks to realise a scheme that is truly ‘For Margate, by Margate’, proposing a year-round intervention that empowers the local community to reclaim Margate and improve it on their terms, instead of being externally-driven as it has been thus far.

Centred around locals, the scheme is a self-build ‘Place-holder’ community centre for Margate‘s everyday. Over the years, Margate’s popularity as a tourist hub, as well as its eventual decay, have been well documented. Improvements have largely aimed to leverage tourist activities and creatives, focusing on the Turner, Dreamland and the town centre, which have spruced the town up but are largely out of sync with residents‘ lives. Inverting this, the project aims to maximise local from the perspective of materials, construction, target audience and legacy. The area of focus for the project is the first of three proposed phases of the Place-holder.
Sited on Walpole Bay Green, at the intersection of the coast, the green and Cliftonville, the building utilises the abundant chalk underneath the site as the primary building material, alongside recycled material gathered from around Margate. Locals construct the scheme, gaining experience and knowledge through a series of chalk workshops taught first by professionals, before the baton is handed to locals as more experience is gained. In this, the scheme draws from the land and the people.

Ultimately, the project aims to question the top-down manner of regeneration strategies and new projects, suggesting an alternative approach where the process of local involvement, material use and collective building provides the platform for a bottom-up, intrinsically local strategy that is truly relevant to the lives of Margate’s residents.

Muyun Qiu, PG13 Year 5, 2022

Muyun Qiu Year 5 PG13 2022

This project seeks to explore how people can cohabit with the heritagised built past, and how architectural interventions on heritage sites that encourage active use can help realise the multiple potentialities of heritage, even if said heritage is politically and historically contentious in nature. It challenges the belief that heritage preservation necessitates the monumentalisation of historical structures.
The project is sited in Yuanming Yuan, also known as the Old Summer Palace, which was destroyed in 1860 during the Second Opium War by the Anglo-French Expedition. Since the late 1980s, the meaning of Yuanming Yuan has been increasingly monopolised by the Chinese party-state for anti-foreign propaganda, in the name of heritage conservation. The way in which the ruins of Yuanming Yuan are curated and consumed has brewed waves of revanchist nationalism that are difficult to contain. As a response, the project proposes to return the ruins of Yuanming Yuan to the local population, allowing people to reconcile with a dark chapter of national history through the adaptive reuse of the ruins.
Informed by the surrounding urban context which contains large numbers of urban villagers, migrant workers and members of higher education institutions, a series of highly localised programmes oriented towards their different yet often overlapping everyday lives are proposed. In the proposed structures, the interventions serve as protective shelters for the ruins, whereas the ruins not only provide structural support, but also become active and integral parts of the inhabitant’s daily lives. By literally dwelling on the past, we embark on a journey to de-monumentalise our heritagised past, so that we no longer dwell on the past.