Bad Language. Good City.

Our studio is an extension of our practice, 31/44 Architects; we teach how we practise and discuss the often difficult role of an architect. We will be talking to you about the Bad Language that we speak as a practice – and encouraging you to develop your own kind of Bad Language. Our work is focussed on seeking out an appropriate architectural language for each site we work with. We are impure and unfaithful – we do not subscribe to just one school of thought – we are not Classical, Modern, Post-Modern or anything in-between. We are all of those things – we believe that as an architect you can have it all – you can simultaneously enjoy highly diverse sources and work with and reference them all. We bend and shape the rules at our convenience – but we do comply to what we believe are the rules of responsible city-making. We interrogate every decision we make to ensure that it is robust, logical and with meaning.

Each year we focus on preserving and promoting a mixed-use, intensely used, inclusive London. This year we are considering the idea of an intimate kind of public space. We are all familiar with the grand public spaces of cities but we are more interested in the informal, the accidental, the enticing and the sometimes magical small scale squares, alleyways and yards. It is these spaces where normal life occurs, they bind together our daily existence. We will be studying the scale, quality and detail of these spaces.

Students will produce thoughtful cultural buildings which are ‘intimate’ and re-establish a small scale public space or route: with the focus being on developing architecture which works to create a ‘Good City’. As a studio we will be working with a specific programmatic brief which will be for a part-productive/part-cultural building which will replace a lost or absent facet of the neighbourhood you are working within. This year we will be working in East London (Whitechapel through to Bethnal Green) and we will be looking at repairing the city fabric around yards and left over space created by the remnants of small scale ad-hoc manufacturing buildings.

We will be focusing on ‘making’ as a theme, with the dual strands of ‘city making’ and ‘construction’ being key touchstones throughout the year. We will begin by looking in detail at a collection of houses where the architectural language has developed out of a rich expressive tectonic. Beautifully made houses have an intimacy that we believe can be scaled up to the city – to produce a more carefully ‘woven’ city fabric. Students will then use this research as the starting point for developing their own architectural language which has a similar level of care and particularity of construction.

Our studio is very structured with a combination of research and propositional briefs throughout both terms. These briefs focus on scaling up research to form a proposal. We will produce buildings by working simultaneously on small details and the overall scale and form of the building; everything, all at once.