Images above: ‘Tale of Lamplighter’ by Farah Anwar 2023 (left), Unit 5 & The Community Brain event: Kingston Light Procession, March 2023

We are interested in developing an architecture that is fantastic, intuitive, empathetic, and polyphonic; one that derives meaning from more than one source and plays with ritual and mysticism in contemporary culture. We want to create architecture which speaks to people’s emotions, touches on collective memories, and dreams for future possibilities.

Unit 5 will continue to explore and expand on the last three years of enquires into mythology and storytelling as a vehicle for Kingston’s town centre regeneration strategies (Dreams, Myths and Fairy tales 2022-23), how human emotions are provoked through forms, materials, and constructions (Material Anthropology 2021-22), and the primary relationship between nature and architecture (The Nature of Architecture 2020-21).

Local:

This year, we will continue to reimagine Kingston town centre, focussing on two existing buildings: The Bentalls Centre and John Lewis. These buildings that occupy a large portion of the town centre area and play a central role in attracting shoppers and visitors from within, around the town centre, and across London. However, due to the steady decline in the popularity of shopping centres during the 1990s, the impact of the pandemic and the rise of online shopping, the shopping centre typology requires rethinking and redefining its roles and functions. We believe that these buildings have substantial transformational potential for the benefit of the town centre and beyond.

Our thesis projects will speculate on what the future looks like for these shopping monoliths, considering both their functional and programmatic aspects, as well as the spatial reconfigurations of the existing buildings and their surrounding public realms.

As always, we will work closely with various local community partners, such as The Community Brain and Citizen Zoo, to directly engage with the issues the town centre is currently facing through a variety of activities.

Regional / National:

The Unit is joined by Tina Jadav from the Greater London Authority, and she will bring a new angle to the unit’s concern from a policy maker’s point of view. We will have a series of seminars and workshops with experts in the field exploring projects and practices that are happening across London to disrupt the existing model of retail, department stores and shopping centres and apply these ideas, to consider Kingston town centre to explore as a case study for the future of shopping centres at a national level.

Global:

The Unit is invited by the UK based arts organisation Grizedale Arts to take part in the project in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi prefecture in Japan in February 2024. We will travel to Japan and conduct workshops to co-design a pavilion for the Shimonoseki City Art Museum concerning history, tradition, crafts and local productions for the town’s economy.