The current crisis magnifies larger societal trends which already threaten a retreat into an atomised alienated digital world. Fortunately, the discipline of Architecture is well placed to encourage ourselves and others to richer more ambitious possibilities. Thinking through making, the primacy of lived sensory experience and collaboration with others are key to both coping with and transcending the immediate precarity. 

This is a good moment to consider our approach to childhood and learning, and their position within a host of complex contradictory forces. The primary school offers a pivotal role in this, emblematic and instrumental in our approach to the individual and the collective. We will look at School as City and propose radical learning spaces at the scale of the room and the neighbourhood.  

We will consider how to expand and reorganise Hallsville Primary School in East London, itself set with a wider regeneration context. Considering both meanwhile and masterplan approaches, and reaching further to adjust the wider regeneration proposals, this will frame detailed proposals for a new foyer for the school. The place where it all comes together, where the values and ambitions of the school are enacted and enabled by the architecture.