Unit 1
Civic Spectacular Holly Lewis, Sabine Storp
Year 2 Florence Bassa, Nicola Chan, Pui Quan Choi, Christopher Dembinski, Mouna Kalla-Sacranie, Alan Ma, Tobias Petyt, Cara Williams Year 3 Alexandria Anderson, Jessica Clements, Jamie Hignett, Aiko Nakada, Emily Priest, Claire Seager, Joe Travers-Jones, Timmy Whitehouse The Bartlett School of Architecture 2014
Special thanks to Samson Adjei and to our sponsors, Pho, Once Milano Linen and Viaduct Furniture Thanks to our consultants and critics: Nicola Antaki, Kyle Buchanan, Margaret Bursa, Mollie Claypool, Rebecca Fode, Oliver Goodhall, Caroline Newton, Luke Royffe, Peg Rawes, Patrick Weber, Jonas Zukauskas Thanks to our hosts in Hanoi: National University of Civil Engineering, Vietnam Urban Planning and Development Association, Vo Trong Nghia Architects, Tran Yen The and The Son Nguyen
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Unit 1 is interested in architecture as a force for collective good in the city. Our projects intend to provoke discourse and thought through social endeavour and spectacular interventions. We began the year by investigating London’s designated ‘Opportunity and Intensification Areas’. These are places of financial growth and numerous development opportunities, but also of displacement and infrastructural pressure. Our design proposals for these sites sought to reinvigorate forgotten spaces and realise the latent civic potential of underused sites. Throughout the project we produced a series of publications in order to communicate our ideas to wider, non-professional audiences. Whilst rapid, the pace of urban change in London is still vastly outmatched by that of Asia’s large cities. For our second project, we focused on the impacts of such change on the inhabitants of Hanoi, Vietnam’s capital city. Rapid urban growth and increasing development pressure is leading to greater competition for land use in Hanoi. In particular this threatens urban agriculture, which in Hanoi currently meets nearly 75% of the city’s food demand. Conversion to non-agricultural urban uses presents a dilemma to Hanoi’s inhabitants: balancing food security and affordability against profit. This rapid population expansion also puts pressure on the city’s infrastructure, open spaces and cultural heritage. Our projects make proposals to address these issues by making creative responses to the economic, cultural and social dynamics of the city. The outcomes combine low cost, small-scale projects, dexterous medium-scale architectural interventions and ambitious large-scale visions for the future of Hanoi.