Studio 3.5 - How We Live

What does it mean, to live in a room? Is to live in a place to take possession of it? What does taking possession of a place mean? As from when does somewhere become truly yours? Is it when you’ve put your three pairs of socks to soak in a pink plastic bowl? Georges Perec, Species of Spaces, p.24

Our year will open with a contemplation of dwelling, throughout which we will draw and discuss our homes, the houses we once visited, and the rooms that we imagine. How do plan and material combine to provide shelter, security, and calm? As the pandemic has reminded us, the home is simultaneously a site of a labour and repose – where we cook, clean, and raise children – sleep, lounge, and play. At the same time we will study how our homes interact with the public realm, forming spots where we might wave to a neighbour and linger to chat with a friend. A home is of course part of the private realm but where they cluster, they act to enclose and form the public realm.

Across the first semester we will develop an acquaintance with an area called Custom House in the London Council of Newham where a decades-long development project proposes to create thousands of new houses whilst threatening hundreds of existing homes with demolition. The scheme follows successive historical waves of residential clearance across the area following extensive dockside bombing in WWII and then the infamous explosion at Ronan Point. This cyclical return to a tabula rasa rejects the lessons of preceding generations of homes, repeatedly stripping the area of a population and identity.

Our analysis will learn from the large body of evidence and community-led masterplan developed by local group PEACH who have formed with the aim of resisting the nation-wide dispersal of residents common to such redevelopment in London. The community have proposed a phased pattern of redevelopment combining demolition, refurbishment, and new construction that aims to avoid the recurring pitfalls of London’s large-scale estate renewals.

The second semester will see us develop proposals for medium scale housing projects at Custom House where the lessons of the first semester will be deployed to form schemes with rich private and public realms. Just as we balance an individual or family’s desire for privacy with the maintenance of community so will we balance local residents’ hopes for the familiar with an offer of the new. How might we deploy contemporary sustainable systems of construction, circulation schemes, and permeable facades to create attractive and sociable housing?