MPhil exhibition catalogue 2021

university of cambridge

MA U D 2021

MA U S department of architecture

MAUD

MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design 1 2 3 4

about MAUD MAUD theses MAUD year 5 MAUD year 4

p3 p6 p8 p47

MAUS

MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies 5 6

about MAUS MAUS theses

p70 p72

This catalogue accompanies the exhibition of the work from the students of the MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (2019-2021/ 2020-2022) and MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies (2020-2021) hosted at the Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, June 2021.

Department of Architecture University of Cambridge 1-5 Scroope Terrace Cambridge, CB2 1PX

for more on the work of the 2021 cohort, and past projects visit: cambridge-design-research-studio.com

MA U D

4

MAUD

MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design Year 5

Karen Young Jacqueline Tsang Jefferson Chan Kexin Feng James Smith Vishmi Jayawardene Laura Turner Louis Lupien Lewis Shannon Charlotte Airey Irene Carlucci Khensani de Klerk Tong Jiang Helena Jordan Shirley Lo Joseph Marchbank Raghav Rayasam Chelsea Sia Stephen Smith Jennifer Smith Zhonghan Tan Elliot Zheng Zhou

Year 4

Hadley James Clarke Zizheng Wu Kirsty Bekoe-Tabiri Lide Li Rachel Kelly Yanny Lung Sophia Malik Lou Elena Bouey Benjamin Carter Sebastian Fathi Grey Grierson Bijou Harding Finnegan Harries Weixuan He Yousuf Khalil Kimberley Lau Matthew Lindsay Ryan Myers Ama Ofori-Darko Stephen Pearcy Ellie Piper Joe Ridealgh Michal Saniewski Charlotte Smith Kieran Tam Iiris Tähti Toom Zizheng Wu

About Cambridge Design Research Studio (CDRS) is a collaborative institute of design research within the Department of Architecture at the University of Cambridge, UK. It builds on work established in the MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design and provides a platform for continued research, live projects and publication.

The design-research MPhil degree has professional accreditation (RIBA/ARB Part 2) and builds on and expands the previous Diploma programme. This is a course that enables each student to identify a unique thesis topic and to test the possibilities of using a set of design proposals as a research methodology. This course provides a platform for bringing together the research interests in Cambridge with its studio objectives. The means by which this happens is continually evolving and places the debate about the relationship between research and design at the centre of the school. Each project is an individual exploration of contemporary issues in the built environment consolidating months of research, discussion and interdisciplinary collaboration in a design proposal.

The course is structured in two parts, the residential period dedicated to the intensive study of the cultural, theoretical, and technical factors shaping each thesis topic, explored through a rigorous set of design tests and culminating in a full written thesis and project portfolio; and the second, a fieldwork period (after two terms of study) in which the implications of outline proposals are examined on site, or within a professional context. These components provide an opportunity to explore distinct design approaches in various settings, whilst offering a sound framework to pursue meaningful research. We treat every project as potentially ‘live’ and encourage students to carry their projects through to fruition after graduation within the structure of the Design Research Studio.

5

Teaching Staff Ingrid Schröder is a practicing architect and the founding Director of Cambridge Design Research Studio. She has taught at Cambridge since 2001 and served as a Design Tutor and Lecturer on Urban Theory here and at the Architectural Association and ETH Zurich. She has been directing the MPhil/ RIBA Part II programme since 2011.

Her current projects in teaching, research and practice focus on the relationship between political thought, civic space and urbanism.

Aram Mooradian is the director of Mooradian Studio, a London-based architecture practice. Aram worked for many years at 6a architects on a range of culture and heritage projects including Juergen Teller’s Studio and The Perimeter. Prior to this he was a design researcher for Farshid Moussavi Architecture and a designer at Herzog & de Meuron. He graduated from the Architectural Association in 2011.

While at the AA, Aram co-edited the weekly magazine Fulcrum and his graduating project on the Australian gold economy was widely published and exhibited at the V&A. His current research interests include how arts and culture institutions are structured, in particular those of diasporic communities.

James Pockson trained as an architect in Cambridge and the RCA. He worked for Herzog and De Meuron and has written extensively for the Architectural Review.

Visiting Critics

6

Pooja Agrawal Liam Ashmore Tiago Baldaque Da Silva Fabrizio Ballabio Max Beckenbauer Umberto Bellardi Ricci Blanca Bravo Reyes Alex Butterworth Mark Campbell Barbara Campbell-Lange Peter Carl Tom Clewlow Matthew Critchley Max Dewdney Ryan Dillon

Julika Gittner practices and teaches across the disciplines of art and architecture. Her sculpture, performance, sound and video works have been shown internationally and explore the social and political role of art and architecture.

After graduating in Fine Art at Goldsmiths and architecture at UCL and the AA Julika has taught art and architecture at universities in the UK and abroad and is currently teaching on the MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (MAUD) at Cambridge after leading the first year as studio master there between 2010-2019. In 2019 Julika was awarded the SWW DTP2 PhD studentship to undertake an interdisciplinary practice-based PhD in Fine Art and Architecture at the Universities of Reading and Cardiff.

Conrad Koslowsky is the director of a designled practice founded on principles of material responsibility, craftsmanship, and sustainability in its broadest sense. His current projects include a children’s care home, a lake house in Canada, and several residential developments and retail fitouts. Prior to founding his own practice, he was a senior associate at Roz Barr Architects. He has taught on courses at Oxford, Camberwell, and the Architectural Association, and his independent research projects have been exhibited in galleries in Japan, Canada, and the UK. With a background in construction, liberal arts, music, and photography, Conrad completed his degree at the Architectural Association in 2013. His work has been nominated for the RIBA President’s Medal, and he has been the recipient of the Nicholas Boas Travel Scholarship for the British School in Rome.

Oliver Domeisen Liza Fior Kathryn Firth Aidan Hall Tom Housden Summer Islam Maddie Kessler David Knight Daniel Koo Guan Lee Udayan Mazumdar Farshid Moussavi Katherine Nolan Hugh Pidduck Chris Pierce

Juliet Quintero Evan Saarinen Matteo Sarno Neal Shasore Kit Stiby Harris Charles Tashima Jeroen van Ameijde Manijeh Verghese Leonie Welling Will Whitby Finn Williams Natalie Wojtowicz Emma Woodward Human Wu John Zhang

MAUD

MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design

The MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (MAUD) is the RIBA Part 2 programme in Cambridge. The projects shown here are developed over eighteen-months, including a six-month dedicated fieldwork period. Some of these have been completed, while the 4th year projects remain in progress.

The course offers a unique opportunity for students to examine the relationship between design and research, to collaborate with both actors on their respective sites, and academic experts active in their field of enquiry. We are intent on embedding a considered design methodology within serious academic endeavour as a model for graduate design teaching. It is clear to us that a graduate design school cannot, and should not, simply provide students with an expanded and more complex version of their undergraduate learning.

Furthermore, it is paramount that we stretch and challenge our students, preparing them with the intellectual and design skills not to serve the profession, but to lead it.

We have built this ambition and research rigour into the structure of the programme. This has entailed establishing extensive collaborative networks within the wider university and beyond. Students are paired with anthropologists, neurologists, economists leading educational theorists, and specialists in land and property law, as well as developers and conflict negotiators. This creative matchmaking has emerged out of a resourceful exploitation of the strong intellectual currency of the wider university and its attendant reputation and institutional partnerships. These have allowed students to join research teams in the region of their thesis projects for their extended fieldwork period. Closer to home, our students are working with local councils, funding bodies, and activist organisations to build opportunities to realise their projects after graduation.

The work now emerging from the course is a reflection of these networks and the cohort’s confidence to ground their thinking in the social, economic, political and material realities of their respective sites. At a time when the discourse surrounding architectural pedagogy is focusing on engaging with the ‘real world’ and the realities of practice, We ask our students to treat every project as ‘live’, the term extending beyond fabrication to encompass the way in which we engage in current debate, what and how we write, what and how we draw, and what and how we act or build. It is our belief that we remain relevant and necessary as an institution through this broader understanding of how we practice our discipline.

In each case this relies on the reconciliation of the aims of research and design.

The relationship between the two enables us to question the value of design as a means of research rather than an output of an analytical process. In response, the structure of the programme encourages students to make creative speculation the focal point for initiating debate and developing the direction of research. We urge them to champion propositional thinking and to trust instinct and innovation as a defensible methodology. We promote a balance of responsible engagement and fearlessness amongst our students that ranges from a fierce sense of social responsibility to an undeterred pursuit of delight.

Ingrid Schröder Director - Cambridge Design Research Studio

7

Year 5

project

thesis

Lewis Shannon

Neurodivercity

‘Self-ism’: Reclaiming the Neurocosmopolitan City from ‘Autism-Friendliness’

Vishmi Jayawardene

Gendered Resistance - A Spatial Study of Female Migrant Labour Force employed in the Katunayake Free Trade Zone

Negotiating Landscapes of Control and Resistance

Shirley Lo

Strangeness in Limehouse - Recovering Strange Spatialities as an Instrument for the Other

Strangeness in Limehouse

Chelsea Sia

Above the Clearing

An Elegy to the Grave: Emplacing Meaning on the Cemeteries of Singapore

Elliot Zheng Zhou

Biennale in Action - Biennale-Making as a Design Method for Urban Regeneration

City-making through Exhibition-making: the UABB as Methods for Research and Design

James Smith

Parasite Housing in Old Oak Common Exploring the reuse of material from OPDC Planning Policy to produce additional housing

Hiding in Policy: The complicity of architects in the inequitable provision of housing: a study of the planning and design process at Old Oak Common

Jefferson Chan

Post-Colonial Hong Kong: Redefining New Town’s Civic Realm

Post-Colonial Hong Kong New Towns: an Alternative Narrative?

Irene Carlucci

Croydon and the Dream Factory Implementing a New Generation of Urban Shopping Centres

Croydon and the Dream Factory

Jacqueline Tsang

ReValuing Care - The Intersection of Endings and Beginnings

ReValued Life: a New Legacy for Care Homes and the Aged

Karen Young

Stagecraft - From Cultural Placemaking to Stagecraft; Staged Craft: Placemaking, Cantonese the Making of Cultural Places in Hong Kong Opera, and Cultural Identity in Hong Kong

Helena Jordan

Developing the Dearne - Reconceptualising Developing the Dearne Development through Landscape Reinhabitation

Stephen Smith

Welcome to Wintonia © - The New Destination for Heritage

Ye Olde Winchester

Joseph Marchbank

The Ikeaization of India?

On the Ikeaization of India

Zhonghan Tan

Over your City Grass will Grow - Rightsizing Coping with Shrinkage: Design for Less - Fewer People, Chinese Shrinking City Fewer Buildings, Fewer Land Uses

Khensani de Klerk

Public aGender - Uncovering Typologies of Safe Space in Cape Town for Survivors of Gender Based Violence

Public aGender: a Method for Implementing Safe Space Typologies in Cape Town

Tong Jiang

The Self-Build: An Alternative Neighbourhood

Self-Build: An Alternative to Rebalance Freedom and Power in Urban Redevelopment

Charlotte Airey

Unlearning Wilderness - Indigenous Forestry at Wainuiototo New Chum

Unlearning Wilderness: Unsettling Dominant Narratives of Landscape in the Aotearoa New Zealand Exurban Coastal Environment

Jennifer Smith

Gwalia Yard - Community-Led Development To Save a High Street as a Strategy for High Street Revival

8

Year 4

project

pilot thesis

Benjamin Carter

Spaces of Edification - Re-integrating the Urban University Campus

Infrastructure/Megastructure: Forms of Consolidation at the UMIST Campus and MEC Hall, Manchester

Stephen Pearcy

Landscape & Material Culture - An Approach to the UK’s Green(belt) Industrial Revolution

Reconceiving the Rural

Joe Ridealgh

A Piece Of The Pub - A Proposal for PubDriven Housing Estates in England.

Who Wants to Build a Pub? The Public House as a Vehicle for Housing Development & Social Reform in England.

Ryan Myers

The Spirit Of Ukiyo - An Investigation of the Technological within the Japanese Urban Environment during a Period of Unprecedented Social and Economic Change.

Do Tradition and Technology Harmonise in Techtopian Tokyo? An Investigation into the Technological Urban Landscape of Japan

Rachel Kelly

A Recipe for Co-Production - Socially Embedded Food and Architecture

The Economies of R-Urban: The Process of (re)Embedding Food and Architecture

Michal Saniewski

Transformative Reconstruction - Crafting Falerone’s Earthquake-Resistant Future

Transformative Reconstruction - Crafting Falerone’s Earthquake-Resistant Future

Kieran Tam

A Calais Reincarnate - Reimagining the condition of displacement in places of transit.

A Calais Reincarnate - An Alternative Vision for the Condition of Displacement in Calais

Ellie Piper

A City of One’s Own - Gendered Spaces in Relation to Property Ownership and Displacement

Gendering the Gecekondu - Spatial Dichotomies, Domestic Violence, and the Need for Cultural Ownership in Istanbul

Grey Grierson

Reconstructing Kiruna - Investigating the Generative Potential of Preservation

Reconstructing Kiruna - Exploring Digital Conservation for a Transforming Town

Yousuf Khalil

Workshop City

Gridded Towns and Gated Communities - The Politics of Luxury Living, Islam and the Legacy of the Masterplan in Islamabad

Bijou Harding

The Body Knows the Body Remembers

The Body Knows the Body Remembers - The Sensory Experience of Spaces Touching the Body

Hadley Clarke

(Re)valuing Circularity & (Re)circulating Value - Implementing a Secondary Layer of (Re)production in Existing Urban Industrial Landscapes to Identify Holistic Value

(Re)circulating Value - investigating Perceptions of Value in Products and Production to Form a Foundation for Transformist Circularity

Lide Li

Beyond Ecotourism - Reconstructing Resilience in Ecotourism Destinations Smartly

Living Lab as an Innovative Arena for Ecotourism Development in East and Southeast Asia Context

Kimberley Lau

Amphibious Futures

Pursuing Civic Functions in a Flooded Tilbury - Lessons from Venice, Jamaica, and Thailand

Ama Ofori-Darko

Sanctuary in the City

Sanctuary in the City - Faith, Youth & Regeneration

Matthew Lindsay

Post Burial - Kensal Green Cemetery Woodland

Death in the City

Weixuan He

What if a M.E.G.A China

Resilience, Inclusiveness and Well-Being - an Innovative Urban Agenda of Inhabitable “Global City” based on Chinese “Arrival City” Building Process

Iiris Tähti Toom

Recycling Socialism - Reimagining PostSoviet Housing Districts in Tallinn, Estonia

Inhabiting Otherness - Russian Minority Memory and Spatial Appropriation in the Post-Soviet Housing District of Lasnamäe, Tallinn

Sophia Malik

Heritage not Inherited - Shifting Value Systems for Alternative Futures

Decolonising Karachi’s Heritage Architecture: Notions of Value & Approaches within the Built Environment 9

Challenging the Education Retrograde How a Dispersed, Mix-Use School can Provide Intervention in InnerCity London.

London, UK

In architecture, education studies and other human sciences, recent years have seen a renewed interest in the ‘dispersed’ model of education. A dispersed school is a geographical scattering of learning sites where education is divorced from a physical, single institution. Pedagogically, it draws comparisons with a ‘deschooling’ of learners, whereby education flourishes through networks of expertise and engagement in your local community.

This project is a dispersed secondary school in Southwark with an aim of integrating the school with the community. The two aims of introducing the school to the city, and inviting the city into the school, involve a desegregation of educational topographies which utilises underused pockets of land and existing community facilities to create a network of relationships for educational purposes. I am finding ways to meet the issues of overcrowded and underresourced schools to create radical educational opportunities in inner city London; this calls for a pedagogical overhaul where a new cohort of students, along with the existing students and community members, will integrate through the permeable edges of the school in a choreography of new, reenergised, urban learning.

The pandemic has proved an even stronger argument for sharing educational and spatial resources – this project has inadvertently become a draft policy for resilience.

10

Laura Turner

lgt24@cam.ac.uk

11

Biennale in Action Biennale-Making as a Design Method for Urban Regeneration Shenzhen, China

“Biennale in Action” speculates an alternative model of Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, which will use the biennale-making as a vehicle to instigate incremental and multi-scalar urban regeneration while empowering the local communities.

The thesis explores how exhibition-making could 1/ materialize social critiques into tangible forms of urban installations; 2/ offer a participatory platform for the regeneration of existing structure for long-term community use after the exhibition period. The project takes the past biennale venue of Kwun Tong, Hong Kong, as a site to adapt a disused vehicle pier into the main venue for this shortterm exhibition. In the meantime, a series of nomadic pavilions are devised and placed across the area as sub-venues for the public to participate.

After the biennale, this project further redevelops the pier into a long-term community laboratory with the materials recycled from the dismantled exhibits. It will function as a node of cultural production, engagement and reception to support the local craftsmen, local cultural groups and other social enterprises around the neighbourhoods. Through this process, the thesis serves as a critique on the display of spectacles and the gentrification agenda observed in the global phenomenon of “biennalization”.

12

Elliot Zheng Zhou

zz393@cam.ac.uk

13

Interplay With Love Place Begins Paris, France

Triggered by the blatant indifference towards Love, a concept loaded with resonances for the field of spatial studies, this project is an attempt to expand on current research tendencies on the subject and seek to portray love as a valid and potent ontology for the field of urban studies and architectural production. In its relation to space, love appears to not only open the relationship that we maintain towards potential spaces but to ground these imagined realities in their most relational dimension.

Thinking more loving worlds means thinking more playfully means thinking more open worlds. This tendency to recognise certain chosen chunks of reality as more real than certain others (as though the crime, the pollution and the smell of urine of a city existed more than the moments of solidarity, magic and love experienced daily by its citizens) has left out parts of our emotional selves up for grabs and prone to manipulation.

This project is an attempt to reclaim that chunk of reality: to name it, visualise it, face it, understand it and reappropriate the world projected by it by making the atmosphere of love a usable and valid cultural tool for spatial practices.

14

Louis Lupien

lsl34@cam.ac.uk

15

Neurodivercity Glasgow, Scotland

As cities across the UK and Ireland seek to become officially recognised as ‘autism-friendly’, the project aims to critically explore the notion of the ‘Autism-Friendly’ city. Drawing from discourses on liberal ethics, difference, and the city, the project is primarily concerned with the bio-political intersections between; autism as a form of subjectivity, notions of personhood, social collectivity, and the city as polity.

The project employs a speculative approach that seeks to explore, critique, and problematise the tacit reinforcement of authoritative constructions of normativity in predominant cultural perceptions of autistic or neurodiverse people.

Building anachronistically on the work and ideas of Fernand Deligny through the proposition of a leisure centre, the project attempts to further spatially elaborate a ‘neurocosmopolitan’ ethic.

The relational aesthetics of the leisure centre providing a counterpropositional contrast to the ‘Scottish Strategy for Autism’s notion of what constitutes the citizen, as well as the surface level means and metrics by which a city might be considered ‘autism-friendly’.

16

Lewis Shannon

ls850@cam.ac.uk

17

Croydon and the Dream Factory Towards A Publicly Successful Private Town Centre Croydon, UK

18

The thesis of this project challenges the issues concerning town centres that provide publicly accessible yet privately owned shopping centres at the core of their civic urban space. The main focus of this research is to focus on the role of private interest on the public realm, specifically on how Croydon’s town centre will embrace the private sector for a second urban regeneration, following the approval of Westfield redevelopment plan. This subject is of contentious nature and has now become of global interest, especially following recent global events and the overall cultural changes society is currently experiencing. This study is located within a complex debate with the sole purpose of creating a safe, equal, environmentally sustainable and forward-looking civic space.

This research analyses not only the architectural typology of the shopping centre of the future but also its management and governance by outlining the brief for an alternative model conceived as the Dream Factory. Spatially, the Dream Factory challenges the shopping centre model of an enclosed, inward-looking urban structure, instead imagining how a shopping centre might actually behave as a town centre. Furthermore, the Dream Factory is conceived as a new form of privately-owned public space that can accommodate the rights of the community as well as those of the consumer. Morally the Dream Factory concept challenges consumerism, corporations, chain outlets and large landowners to re-direct their investments into people and their dreams.

Irene Carlucci

ic371@cam.ac.uk

19

Strangeness in Limehouse Recovering Strange Spatialities as an Instrument for the Other Limehouse, London

20

Founded upon the thesis argument that spatial strangeness has a significant role to play in propelling social change, the proposal integrates the strangeness that characterises the fictional realm of the neighbourhood into the regeneration of a disused warehouse.

The repurposed space is controlled by a local sewing group, offering them a permanent venue to expand the scope of their work, whilst also providing local residents much-needed public amenities. With the skyscrapers of Canary Wharf forming a ubiquitous backdrop, the warehouse stands as a strange fragment in the banal and ordered city.

The project culminates in a fictional film, narrated from the perspective of a participant of the sewing group, who arrived as an immigrant in Limehouse at the start of the narrative. She describes her personal journey and her encounter with the building, which became the key to unlocking the fictional realm of the neighbourhood. She began to draw parallels between her story and historic events, in a sequence that blurs the boundary between fact and fiction. Through a series of events, she discovers the hidden secrets of the neighbourhood, offering her a sense of ownership to the urban environment.

Shirley Lo

sl763@cam.ac.uk

21

Gendered Resistance A Spatial Study of Female Migrant Labour Force employed in the Katunayake Free Trade Zone Katunayake, Sri Lanka

22

This design thesis frames its investigation of female free trade zone workers in Sri Lanka through the zone spaces that feature in their daily lives, the most potent of which are the jurisdictionally concealed garment factories; the unliveable tenements; and the unfriendly peripheral streets of the city of Katunayake. The question posits can an architectural intervention alleviate the institutional and ingrained dogmas of this specific group of classed, gendered subjects living and earning in just one of many manufacturing zones of the global south?

In response, using the zone as both site, subject and adversary, I proffer an architectural proposition as a rebuttal, or indeed a challenge, to a persistent social narrative that relegates female FTZ workers in to ‘semi-citizenships’ and vilifies them as practitioners of disrespectable femininity, and instead shift this narrative so that women workers’ prescribed ‘outsider’ position is subverted so that they claim ownership of the city, through better access to spaces that offer a counter to the devalued, marginal places of the zone and the stigma attached to them.

Vishmi Jayawardene

vj266@cam.ac.uk

23

Above the Clearing Singapore

The project is an alternative proposal to rehabilitate the presently defunct Bukit Brown Cemetery in Singapore. The forested municipal cemetery, which houses approximately 100,00 historic Chinese graves, has been left to calculated abandon since it closed in 1973.

As an alternative proposal to the cemetery’s impending demolition and clearing, a series of stand-alone, light towers puncture the site, thoughtfully infilling urban nodes of life into an otherwise death-filled place.

Comprising crematoria, public housing, and formalised workspaces for on-site tomb keepers, these towers recover forgotten routes through the forest and retain the site ground in an honesty. The strategy transforms the forested cemetery into a hybrid urban landscape. It is a provocation back to living amidst death, and an expression of a different, larger value to inscribe unto the local expanse, that which is commonly and merely perceived as an underutilised, limited resource in land-scarce Singapore.

24

Chelsea Sia

cs2044@cam.ac.uk

25

Parasite Housing in Old Oak Common Exploring the Reuse of Material from OPDC Planning Policy to Produce Additional Housing

This project seeks to challenge the status quo of contemporary housing production in London, which currently advocates large scale new build developments treating housing as a commodity.

This project aims to explore an alternative architecture created from reuse of the existing building fabric as a template for additional production. This is part of a wider proposed approach using large cooperative structures to enable housing to be provided to residents at greater levels of affordability. This is crucial in high value areas such as West London, where the site is located.

The polemic of this project is not of complete systemic change in the production of housing, but that a responsive approach could exploit the gaps left in current strategies of housing planning at scale.

The supporting of alternate institutions that can use the discard of current housing production productively is a symbiotic approach that could be applied across London as ever more industrial ‘Opportunity areas’ are rezoned for housing.

Willesden Junction, London

26

James Smith

js2524@cam.ac.uk

27

Hotel tier of luxury reflected by level of stone craft:

THE WINTONIAN WALL©

ULTIMATE: Applicable to Royal Roman Suites

LUXURY: Applicable to Saxon Self-Catered

STANDARD: Applicable to Norman Niches

BASIC: Applicable to Iron Age Apartments & Generic Wall

Nostalgic Neighbourhood, Winchester, Hampshire, UK SO23 0ES

Rt Hon Boris Johnson Prime Minister 05.09.2024

REV:

DESCRIPTION:

DATE:

A

Consultant Liaison

24.09.2022

B

Planning Issue

17.01.2023

C

Construction Information

02.05.2024

GOV.UK TIME = MONEY CRAFT = VALUE Please refer to Structural Engineer’s and Stone Mason’s drawings for further detail STATUS: Construction Information DRAWING: Inner Wintonia Column Detail Elevation SCALE: 1:15 @ A2

Welcome to Wintonia© The New Destination for Heritage Winchester, UK

DATE: 02.05.2024

DRAWN: SGS

CHECKED: JP

JOB NO:

DRAWING NO:

REV:

01047

WW - E - A - 001 - P03

C

Following the socio-political desolations of Brexit and Covid, Boris’ Conservative Government seek economic prosperity, opting to ‘take back control’ of heritage as an enabling commodity to help put the country back on the map. Winchester, the ancient capital of England, is selected as the epicentre of this nostalgic experiment for reasons of sheer heritage abundance. The once complete definitive city wall, cruelly lost to the cruel advances of time, is to be re-imposed as a continuous piece of “living”, somewhat theatrical, heritage infrastructure. Whilst functioning as a hotel to host the expected influx of tourists, the wall is to strictly define the bounds of Wintonia; the city re-brand, the new destination for heritage. The plan for Winchester’s future is simply to reflect back its past.

The time capsule wall revolutionises the accessibility and appeal of the past to inspire a new generation of ‘heritage-lovers’. Inside Wintonia’s bounds, the city of ‘Ye Olde Winchester’ is preserved, and a Morris-esque perspective to traditional craftwork reigns supreme. In stark contrast, the external skin celebrates the city’s vast historical catalogue, at last converted to a qualitative format, updated in a continuous show of masonic theatre circumnavigating its 3km length.

28

Stephen George Smith

sgs47@cam.ac.uk

c.1868

c.2000

Jane Austen Memorial

Static Millenia

Millenium Blockwork

c.1899

D4

c.2035

Wintonia Headquarters

Wintonia

King Alfred’s Statue

Victorian Brickwork Colebrook Street

c.1905 Saxon West Flintwork

Norman St Faith’s Church

c.2054

Cheyney Court Dormer

c.1092

Eastgate Mill

FR2

c.1567

FR6 FR5 FR4

FR7

R4

D3

c.54 Roman God Stonework

Saxon South East Wall Extract

c.171

Greek Stone Plinth

c.732

Roman Forum Stonework

c.23

c.23

c.1291 c.966 King Arthur’s Round Table

c.1385

Iron Age

TEMPORAL ERAS

c.43

Roman Venta

Saxon Marble Chest

Venta Belgarum Plaque

Early Saxon

R2

King Alfred Reign

H5

GRADE ‘O’ LISTED Embalm at all costs Lead roof and paintwork

Roman Portico Remnants

R1

FR8

Norman Conquest

H3 G0

Dark Ages Rubble

Early Medieval

R3

H1

c.1190

Dark Ages

H2 D2

St Peter’s Clerestorey

Georgian Resurgence

H4

FR3

FR1

c.867

c.1448

Victorian Historicism

Transistor Window

D1

29

ReValuing Care The Intersection of Endings and Beginnings Aberdeen, Hong Kong

The story of endings in Hong Kong is one that is linear, finite. As objects, places, and people age, their value to the growth of the city diminishes; they are disregarded in exchange for the new.

The continued offhand treatment of both old people and buildings reveals deeper issues in contemporary Hong Kong socio-spatial ideology. To have experienced is to be disposable and thus spaces for endings are treated with less priority. Yet, this contradicts the Chinese philosophy of life; a relationship does not end in death but continues despite taking on a new form. Therefore, elderlies must be given a place within the city that has been vested with the care its residents can also expect to receive.

In opposition to the norm of newness, the vacant site of Former St Peter’s Secondary School is taken as precedent for intervention, catalysing a new beginning in its life cycle. This project takes the disconnect and challenges existing ideas through a reimagining of care homes as a place at the intersection of ends and beginnings, opening new opportunities for care of both people and the physical environment they inhabit.

30

Jacqueline Tsang

jfyt2@cam.ac.uk

31

Stagecraft From Cultural Placemaking to the Making of Cultural Places in Hong Kong Hong Kong

Since the emergence of Cantonese Opera, the genre’s penchant for adaptation and transience had enabled its enduring presence through drastically different contexts. Today, Cantonese Opera is considered an old-fashioned, fading craft but at the same time cherished as a unique intangible cultural heritage that defines Hong Kong.

This project references the Cantonese Opera’s practices and transient nature as a means to design a cultural place, posing an alternative to Hong Kong’s default position of building iconic cultural landmarks as the panacea for not only cultural but also economic development. More broadly, this project responds to current debates relating to Hong Kong’s identity and cultural self-definition, and heritage.

In adapting a former car park into a local cultural hub for Cantonese Opera and traditional crafts, this project aims to support the nurturance of the genre by celebrating its spectacle while also offering spaces for production and knowledge exchange. The proposed strategy champions an approach to designing cultural venues rooted in existing, everyday dynamics and optimises opportunities provided by the (pre-)existing before pursuing the newly built. This thesis embraces cultural development as a gradual, collective, ephemeral and ordinary process, and the project stands as a catalyst to rethink the role of local in the continued negotiation and celebration of Hong Kong’s culture.

32

Karen Young

knky2@cam.ac.uk

33

Developing the Dearne Reconceptualising Development through Landscape Reinhabitation Dearne Valley, South Yorkshire

Alongside many former coalfields, Dearne Valley is one of the most deprived areas in the country. Bereft of opportunity, resources and interest from its three local authorities and Sheffield City Region, these physically isolated communities, exploited by poor working conditions, situated in a degrading townscape and fractured landscape, are socially and politically marginalised.

Developing the Dearne re-conceptualises the idea, vision and processes of regional and spatial development from city-regionalism to bioregionalism. Speculating how self-reliance could be achieved through a process of landscape re-territorialisation, and development defined by a contemporary reframing of historical land-use practices and local material cultures.

Through reintroducing industrial hemp as a rotational crop and stitching fractured areas of rewilded native woodlands together, the damaged landscape is reinhabited for natural and renewable material processes. The proposed Centre for Sustainable Construction - a renewable construction school and site of carbon-negative hempcrete material production - provides the tools for residents to mould their built environment, and manage their immediate environment. The proposed dispersion of specialist training in renewable construction, as a knowledge sector, into peripheral former mining areas, aims to dismantle central government’s citycentrist ‘Northern Powerhouse’ policies – offering an alternative framework for post-industrial mining regions.

34

Helena Jordan

hij23@cam.ac.uk

35

The Ikeaization of India?

Gurgaon, India

36

This project speculates on the internationalisation of Ikea’s forays into homebuilding. Filling a role once assumed by the Swedish welfare state, Ikea has been building low-cost prefabricated ‘BoKlok’ homes in Scandanavia since the 1990s, and, more recently, in the UK. At the same time, the multinational is expanding to further reaches of the Global South in search of new markets for its flatpack furniture. India is a case in point; with a rapidly expanding consumer class congregating in its cities’ new BPO and IT-oriented zones, Ikea has built two stores in the country since 2018, and is planning many more. Their fourth is being built in Gurgaon, India’s so-called ‘Millenium City’ located 30km south-west of Delhi, which is used as a case study to site the design work. For many on India’s new urban peripheries, Ikea’s hallmark of self-build is not a fun optional activity, but a basic necessity in order to stake one’s right to the city.

The design is as such less for a specific building form, more for a catalogue of components to cater for different programatic needs and aesthetic preferences, for possibility.

Joseph Marchbank

jm935@cam.ac.uk

37

Public aGender Uncovering Typologies of Safe Space in Cape Town for Survivors of Gender-Based Violence Cape Town, South Africa

Public aGender proposes a network of safe houses across South Africa developing a typology that considers both reclusive and gregarious spaces of healing for survivors of Gender-based violence.

At an urban level, the project proposes a methodological approach that determines the intervention’s characteristics from the considerations of its potential users, conceiving its brief from the varying and nuanced lived experiences of participants who share their stories on public aGender platform. The platform was developed to glean narratives from survivors of GBV during fieldwork owing to geographic constraints from the pandemic lockdown. The platform centres voiced data, identity protection and multiplicity; ultimately highlighting the value of storytelling in understanding context and framing ethics such that the research meets the pace and preferences of respondents.

At an architectural scale, the proposal designs a safe house for survivors of GBV, using existing community characteristics as safety mechanisms; explicitly moving away from the wall, device and camera as safety. Every safe house is therefore a mixed use project with integrated social housing for existing communities, and in this case a housing project for the Reclaim the City housing advocacy movement occupiers on the site.

In this sense, the project hopes to use both the method of narrative collection and the testing of prototype to make a case for the investment of safe houses at a national scale, showing its benefit to the greater public as an addition to social infrastructure.

38

Khensani de Klerk

krtd2@cam.ac.uk

39

Unlearning Wilderness Indigenous Forestry at Wainuiototo New Chum New Zealand

40

This project rethinks the New Zealand Pākeha relationship with landscapes considered ‘wild.’ These are either bounded and set aside for conservation or commodified for real estate. It reclaims the ‘bach’ (holiday shack) typology as a mechanism for not only leisure and retreat from the city, but as a means of engaging and learning about one’s relationship with the environment.

The proposal is an alternative vision for the as-yet-undeveloped Wainuiototo New Chum landscape, and the broader coastal holiday landscape in New Zealand which has been undergoing a fate of subdivision and suburbanisation for holiday homes. Instead the scheme looks to indigenous forestry research as the underlying reason for dwelling in this landscape. ‘Baches’ are temporary accommodation for those (professional and volunteers) who participate in the ecological surveying, planting, and stewardship of the surroundings. These huts are in dialogue with the forestry centre, the main defining threshold to this landscape containing nursery, small mill and educational and work spaces. The bach is thus no longer an exclusive private dwelling on a land fragmented by land titles but a node in a network which contributes to a broader understanding of the forest and our place within it.

Charlotte Airey

cga25@cam.ac.uk

41

Islands in the City Delhi, India

This project is based in Khirki, an urban village in the south of Delhi, India. It introduces spaces that better integrate urban informality with formal development and lend a higher degree of legitimacy to small-scale businesses in the face of increasing socio-economic unsurety. Specifically, this project looks at consolidating and strengthening material manufacturing and artist networks within Khirki through skill training, resource management, digitization and exposure. It also seeks to set a precedent for sustainable, nondisruptive and long-term urbanism for future projects to follow.

The project specifically deals with multiple local artist and makers NGO’s to establish a space that helps them better connect with individual artists and material manufacturers within Khirki. It would incorporate locally available labor and material in its construction - providing the community with a means to contribute directly.

Observing a model of shared ownership across individuals, NGO’s and the government agencies - it argues for collective urban efforts.

It establishes that providing sustainable spaces for skill training, community gathering, welfare and learning along with infrastructure that reinforces neglected systems of resource management is vital towards the long term strengthening and de-stigmatization of Delhi’s urban informality.

42

Raghav Rayasam

43

Gwalia Yard Community-Led Development as a Strategy for High Street Revival Cardigan, Wales

44

Gwalia Yard is a community-led initiative that aims to help revive Cardigan’s struggling High Street. By providing a base for the town’s growing maker culture and a place for the community to gather on their own terms, the town’s already highly involved residents will regain ownership of their town centre as the heart of Cardigan’s daily life. Digital fabrication facilities and maker spaces will complement the existing preserved culture of heritage making present in the town, while also allowing the industry to develop into the 21st century. Gwalia Yard sits within a wider community-led masterplan that looks to revive the regional town as a centre for the county, providing much needed investment, employment opportunities, and re-enfranchisement to an otherwise neglected region of the UK.

Jennifer Smith

jms324@cam.ac.uk

45

Post-Colonial Hong Kong Redefining New Town’s Civic Realm Sha Tin, Hong Kong

New Towns, behind the myth of a ‘self-sufficient and balanced community’, is after all a scripted and staged way of living.

Since its birth in the 70s, new towns have been home to more than half of the population in Hong Kong. Its physical development comes hand and hand with district administration to establish new communities and a new idea of ‘good citizens’ - on one hand the geometrical urban form embraces discipline and order, on the other hand a top-down, fixated narrative of civic pride based on stability and prosperity is facilitated by the mass social campaigns carried out at district level.

The rise of local identity in the post-colonial era has severely challenged the physical and social status quo of the dwarfed citizenship. In response to the paradigm shift, the project takes form of nodal intervention that subverts a 70’s new town centre from being merely a public access into a catalyst of civic engagement.

46

Jefferson Chan

ckc39@cam.ac.uk

Over Your City Grass will Grow Rightsizing Chinese Shrinking City Yumen, Gansu, China

Urban shrinkage has become a global phenomenon since the 20th century. Although China is on the rise of rapid development, the phenomenon of urban decline has drawn more and more attention from scholars. Yumen, the first Chinese oil city, has faced the population loss from 130,000 to 20,000 during the past 70 years.

The concept of shrinking cities illustrates an important shift that an era of constant growth has gone. Cities in a state of shrinkage have a smaller population scale and fewer resource requirements.

Conversely, a large number of idle assets provide sufficient material foundation for urban redevelopment. This project proposes to reintegrate the urban fabric and social connection by reclaiming and recycling. By which the development of the city is carried out in a dynamic manner with seasonal change to meet the needs of social development.

Zhonghan Tan

zt240@cam.ac.uk

47

The Self-Build An Alternative Neighbourhood Guangzhou, China

In China, urban villages are usually perceived as by-products of rapid modern urbanization and economic growth, but they are distinguished from slums by their exceptional locations and legal status protected by land ownerships recognised by the government.

The unregulated self-build resulted in chaotic construction and poor living conditions, presenting a negative urban image; but its capacity to provide diverse and affordable housing and embrace social diversity, making it a significant role in the city.

Therefore, the problem is how can participatory frameworks be formulated to balance the degree of individual freedom (self-build) and professional intervention. This project intends to reframe and formalise the informal self-build through maintaining the values of self-build while blending it with architect-led intervention, aiming to renew the urban village’s negative and contradictory image by improving the living conditions, providing beautiful dwellings with qualities and comfort, and presenting a distinguished typology of urban dwelling.

48

Tong Jiang

tj326@cam.ac.uk

Recycling Socialism Reimagining Post-Soviet Housing Districts in Tallinn, Estonia Tallinn, Estonia

Thirty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this project revisits the burdened landscapes that outlived the oppressive regime. Using Estonia’s largest and latest panel housing district of Lasnamäe to narrate the nation’s change from socialist to postsocialist, the thesis delves into processes of domestic memory, material culture and the changing delineations of the public-private dichotomy. Through an architectural ontology of Soviet panel housing, the project seeks to revise their depiction as anachronistic curiosities or cultural deadweight, instead highlighting their role as sites of cultural production and contestation.

With the district rapidly reaching the end of its structural lifespan, the design questions what shape its redevelopment — and the resultant masses of construction waste — are to take. As existing landscapes are mined for future resources, Lasnamäe’s limestone plateau and recycled Plattenbau are fused to form more culturally and climatically sensitive models for the redevelopment of lacking community infrastructure.

Iiris Tähti Toom

itt23@cam.ac.uk

49

Spaces of Edification Re-integrating the Urban University Campus Manchester, UK

This thesis studies the potential of a defunct urban university campus – the UMIST campus, Manchester – aiming to understand the utopian and political origins of its past, and to expose the positive aspects of the campus in an alternative plan for its future.

As an autonomous institution, and also a significant urban environment, the campus in the city is a specific urban structure, a world of its own implanted into the fabric of the post-industrial metropolis. This academic enclave, dedicated to advancement in science and technology in the era of post-war ‘White Heat’, signified a moment of restructuring regional and national identity.

At that juncture, the campus reflected a particular political and architectural movement whose testament today is due to be erased, with the demolition of the UMIST campus.

This design project works within the context of the decommissioned UMIST campus, seeking to reanimate the campus by exposing its organisation as a microcosmic city. As the original campus explored how new forms of space can exist in the city, this project will explore how the city can exist within the space of the campus, thus recharging the campus with a condensed urbanity. In a critique of the loss of civic space within the city at large, the design component will draw upon the political and utopianist aspirations of the urban university campus type to propose a new prototype for an urban microdistrict, and in so doing propose an alternative to the total erasure of the UMIST campus.

50

Benjamin Carter

bjc66@cam.ac.uk

Landscape & Material Culture An Approach to the UK’s Green(belt) Industrial Revolution Cambridge, UK

The project seeks to bring together expertise from across the university to develop a new rural satellite workshop for the Department of Architecture’s new Design Tripos programme that allows students and researchers the opportunity to learn through making at 1:1 as part of a new holistic architectural education that tests building from natural materials that can grow in the surrounding landscape.

The fieldwork will consist of interviews and collaborations with local farmers, university staff and fabricators to establish local supply chains and social networks that can help to realise the ambition of the project.

The thesis seeks to answer how might we envisage an alternative landscape for greenbelt land that is not urban, sub-urban or rural and instead hybridises recreational, agrarian and ecological land uses? It will also question, whether, to meet the government’s 2030 carbon capture and green building targets, can and should buildings be made from only locally sourced materials?

Stephen Pearcy

sjp239@cam.ac.uk

51

A Piece of the Pub A Proposal for Pub-Driven Housing Estates in England.

Carlisle, UK

This project proposes a model of building new housing estates that embeds community owned pubs as the social core of each neighbourhood. It will demonstrate the social potential that pub reformation can offer and imagine a neighbourhood where every resident owns a piece of the pub.

The public house, whilst public is name, has primarily been a private venture by speculative developers. Although pubs may appear to the populace as relics of Victorian splendour or quaint pastoralism, the most prolific time for pub building was in fact the mid 20th century, in tandem with the post-war transformation of Britain’s housing. Pub builders and the State alike have historically positioned public houses at strategic points of new residential developments, embedding social centres into new estates.

Now, despite a renewed impetus to build housing, Britain’s pubs are in rapid decline, no longer seen as an important part of a new neighbourhood. Why now has housing development cut its ties with the provision of social space? By positioning this study in Carlisle, I can track the ambition and legacy of the state overhaul of pubs in the interwar period, the Carlisle Experiment, whilst foregrounding the design of an alternative vision for the proposed Garden Village to the south of the city.

52

Joe Ridealgh

jdr51@cam.ac.uk

The Spirit of Ukiyo An Investigation of the Technological within the Japanese Urban Environment during a Period of Unprecedented Social and Economic Change.

Tokyo, Japan

Constant innovation, constant states of exception and stating anew, the increasing immateriality and abstraction of forms of production and consumption have effectively rendered any prescriptive spatial organisation obstructive in the drive towards aspiration of infinite economic growth. As is the case in Japan, the primary concern for economic growth is perhaps the reproduction and stimulation of its workers, consumers, and socio-economic landscape. Where that the primary productive space becomes in fact the reproductive space, the home.

This project is interested in the role of innovation and technology, how these manifest as architectural typologies, and their influence on the family structure within the context of the Japanese socioeconomic landscape. It is a critique of contemporary work culture and design, which continues to treat working environments as warehouses and factories. The project reflects upon the existing, speculative, and newly proposed technological research parks in response to the unprecedented social and economic change occurring in Japan. The outcome of this research aims to define an urban design strategy as a unique response to the advancement of technology and immaterial labour, the evolving family structure and diminishing spirit of the city.

Ryan Myers

rm2027@cam.ac.uk

53

A Recipe for Co-Production Socially Embedding Food and Architecture East London, UK

54

This design-research project considers how the development of socially embedded, physical infrastructure may enable and encourage neighbourhood-scale collective cooking and eating in cities. In particular, it examines community co-production as a method of architectural design and a means of initiating networks of mutual aid. This proposal is emerging as a response to the endemic and related issues of food insecurity, food waste and social isolation.

The project examines how the provision physical infrastructure could help in tackling these endemic issues. More specifically, it hopes to understand how this infrastructure could be developed alongside a wider network of self-managed economies of mutualaid and exchange. An important emphasis is placed on the coproduction and community management of these proposed spaces.

The research hopes to examine architecture’s role in building the conditions of possibility for people to develop resilient methods and networks of support for themselves.

Rachel Kelly

rck36@cam.ac.uk

Transformative Reconstruction Crafting Falerone’s EarthquakeResistant Future Marche, Italy

Falerone, an Italian town located in the central region of Marche, suffered heavily from a series of earthquakes in 2016, which killed hundreds of people and displaced tens of thousands. While Italians have always accepted earthquakes as part of their reality, the catastrophic events of 2016 left a particularly acute aftertaste.

Many families lost their homes, others had to move out because of unsafe conditions. In Falerone, more than 70% of buildings became inaccessible. As a result of forced displacement, the historic town’s population decreased significantly.

Focusing on the future, the aim of this research project is to propose a strategy for its resilient conservation and gradual reinhabitation — to be developed in close collaboration with the local community, authorities and university. Like every other city, Falerone is a living organism which has to constantly evolve, which cannot remain static. During my fieldwork I will research and analyze various approaches to post-earthquake reconstruction in Italy in order to speculate on how the reconstruction process could be used to reinvigorate the damaged town (architecturally, but also socially and economically). Experimenting with design research methods, I will also speculate on how the development of a new craft tradition (rooted in traditions of this place) can facilitate gradual economic rehabilitation. The reconstruction can, and should be, a transformative process, used as an opportunity to help Falerone redefine its identity — and connect its future with its past. The strategy proposed here — a set of principles, an architectural toolkit — even though highly bespoke, could be later adopted as a model in other Italian towns struggling with similar problems.

Michal Saniewski

mts44@cam.ac.uk

55

Workshop City Lahore, Pakistan

56

This project investigates the intersection between British colonialism, modernist town planning, and contemporary privatised enclaves in Pakistan. These modern enclaves manifest a specific cultural and developmentalist tendency to market a notion of ‘luxury living for all’ as a panacea for all urban ills - a capitalist ideal that superficially reconciles the “traditional” and the “modern” at the expense of the majority of the urban population.

This project will develop a plan for reviving The Mughalpura Workshops in Lahore, a British colonial era locomotive repair facility, that has increasingly been under risk of commercial development and exploitation. This project proposes the transformation of this failing industrial area into a piece of city that fosters mutual aid and collective living for Pakistan’s marginalised communities through political activism and adaptive re-use of the site for education and cultural activity. In doing so this project will use the Mughalpura Workshops as a test bed for alternative forms of land ownership for a more equitable society.

Yousuf Khalil

yk382@cam.ac.uk

A Calais Reincarnate Reimagining the Condition of Displacement in Places of Transit.

Calais, France

This project positions the current refugee situation in Calais within the long durée. Using historical precedent to justify human movement through the city as more than the humanitarian crisis that has unfolded over the past thirty years but part of a natural phenomenon that has occurred for centuries due to Calais’ proximity to Britain, encompassing movements of refuge, tourism and industry.

Despite its history as a thriving industrial hub and now playing host to the successful Port and Channel Tunnel, the city today faces high unemployment and a lack of investment and opportunities for the local community, which has sown tension between the unwanted migrants and their unwilling hosts. However, the number of people displaced due to persecution, war, violence and now climate change will only continue to increase and Calais’ geographic position will see it play host to those transiting to the UK regardless of whether they are welcome or not.

Accepting and developing a resilience to this reality could present a potential opportunity for local politics, community and industry to positively engage with the migrant presence and reframe the city’s image celebrating transience in its entirety as a place of both hospitality and refuge.

Kieran Tam

kkmt2@cam.ac.uk

57

A City of One’s Own Gendered Spaces in Relation to Property Ownership and Displacement Istanbul, Turkey

This project focuses on gendered spatial experiences of design and property ownership in Istanbul. It asks what the role of design is in deterring or increasing gendered violence. This subject is contextually important given Turkey withdrew from the Istanbul Convention on 19th March 2021, despite rising levels of femicide and high reports of gendered violence. Inevitably, the threat of male violence in Turkey makes women’s freedom in both the private and public realms conditional. Thus, the project connects property, design, and gendered violence because of the substantial and important literature that reveals women’s property ownership can prevent male domestic violence. The project interrogates how inequality manifests through varying forms of housing ownership structures and how it potentially affects levels of domestic violence and women’s overall experience in private and public space.

Through design-research speculation the project tests whether alternative models of ownership, such as housing cooperatives, can alter existing systems of urban renewal that exclude or oppress women. The preliminary proposal has already piloted alternative forms of ownership as a design strategy in a site in Başıbüyük. It is intended as a spatial intervention against domestic violence and for female property equity and disaster-resilience. In essence, the project seeks to establish that architects can creatively intervene in discourse on legal geography and feminism to challenge homogenous ideals on housing design and propose alternative models in Istanbul that directly increase female equality.

58

Ellie Piper

ehp31@cam.ac.uk

What Do You Want? Render Engine Atacama, Chile

Astronomers essentially do just one thing. They attempt to separate a distant version of reality from their optical instruments and workflows. For the past few centuries, the contemporary architect has done almost exactly the same thing in design stages.

We use optical tools such as our eyes, pencils, cameras, models, etc., to separate what we really want from what the tools really want. We’re bound to these tools because contemporary design stages deal with scaled space, proxy space, and other methods that are positioned at a distance far from the kinaesthetic reality that architecture ultimately exists within at 1:1.

This separation of reality from optical apparatus points to the persuasive and somewhat controlling elements of optical design tools. Flat, rectilinear paper persuades the orthographic plan and section in relation to our eyes, for example. There are innumerable persuasions to a designer within this optic world. Astronomers call these ‘the signature of the instrument’ and attempt to objectively separate them out from their subjects. Architects, however, treat them as implicit.

This project attempts to understand the common, implicit optical languages of the contemporary architect, and agitate the perceptual realm which supports that common language.

This agitation is put towards the redesign of the basecamp accommodation at the Very Large Telescope in Chile, in design collaboration with the astronomers who live and work there, as a form of restoration. Restoration of the basecamp back to its optically inherent roots, and the restoration of optics as an involved agent in design workflows.

Sebastian Fathi

sf681@cam.ac.uk

59

Reconstructing Kiruna Investigating the Generative Potential of Preservation Kiruna, Sweden

Located in northern Sweden, 140km north of the Arctic Circle, Kiruna is being simultaneously destroyed and rebuilt to enable the continued extraction of iron ore. As a result, a third of the population must relocate. Buildings by some of Sweden’s greatest architects, along with housing blocks and streetscapes will disappear forever.

This project proposes an experimental masterplan model that alters Kiruna’s problematic dependence on mining through the use of replication and reconstruction. Fragments of ephemeral spaces, events and fictions form the basis for museums, filmsets and neighbourhoods, each concerned with prototyping and enacting future worlds.

The process of reconstruction is considered as a generative design tool that informs the architecture. Destroyed apartments that exist only in single archival images become staged in public dioramas.

Precise 3D scans of family gatherings are materialised from cast iron. This exchange develops new performances from events that otherwise would have been forgotten, forming new ideas about what it means to preserve and remember.

60

Grey Grierson

gwg25@cam.ac.uk

Bridging Spatial Discontinuities through Transit An Explorative Study of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Border at Lok Ma Chau Hong Kong

In 2019, the Hong Kong riots made international news; riots themselves were nothing new to the city of Hong Kong, but one thing which shocked citizens and bystanders alike was the collapse of the Mass Transit Railway (MTR) system during the events, where the entire network would be shut down for several hours or even days. It raises the question of how infrastructure can be shaped by conflicts themselves and patterns in a contested city, and vice versa.

The situation is further complicated by the relationship between Hong Kong and its neighbouring city of Shenzhen on the administrative facet. Under ‘One Country, Two Systems,’ Hong Kong has its own legal system, meaning travellers need to pass through an immigration check on both ends of their journey. This is often cited as an inefficient procedure, wasting both time and space. Is there any way to utilise these spaces and challenge the typical transit architecture typology? Moreover, what are the implications of this practice once Hong Kong completely returns to China after 2047?

The main study area chosen is Lok Ma Chau, on the border of Hong Kong as a special administrative region with its neighbouring city, Shenzhen. Imagined as an extension to the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Innovation and Technology Park, the project seeks to harness the power of the railway to bridge spatial distances and bring in people of different backgrounds provide a space of encounters for groups of citizens to understand each other, creating a new spatial typology by combining innovative co-working spaces and transit to amass a super hub.

Yanny Lung

61

The Body Knows the Body Remembers Freetown, Sierra Leone

My project aims to explore the human experience within a space and how the experience of being within a space should connect with the body, to be operated and enjoyed.

People with visual impairments must use their bodies and senses in a different way to interact with the world. They possess a unique perception of the world due to the adaptation of their bodies.

Learning from the influence of their needs could create designs that have a heightened experience for all body types, not only those with impairments.

The site for my project is Freetown Sierra Leone. Ending in 2002, SL was devastated by civil war. Problems increased with an Ebola virus (EVD) pandemic from 2014-2016. UNICEF states that 1/5th of survivors of EVD have ocular complications. There is a cultural stigma surrounding people living with disabilities causing them to be ostracised by their communities, leaving them with limited work prospects.

My research and Proposal will focus on creating a space for native craft trades that can be carried out by people living with visual impairments and body conditions.

62

Bijou Harding

bssh2@cam.ac.uk

(Re)valuing Circularity & (Re)circulating Value Implementing a Secondary Layer of (Re)production in Existing Urban Industrial Landscapes to Identify Holistic Value London, UK

Urban industrial landscapes are key drivers in the shift towards a more circular economy. With mounting pressure to reduce destructive behaviours and growing populations circular urban industry offers megacities their own metabolism. This project proposes a new industrial vernacular of (re)production to be stitched within existing urban grain. Acting as a form of urban upcycling, each typology is tailored to alleviate specific restrictions and enhance existing material and spatial values within the industrial landscape. This additional layer of (re)production acts to (re)circulate products whilst simultaneously (re)value industrial landscapes.

It is likely that you own a product you love dearly that is not expensive. It may be a watch, a pen or a t-shirt. It holds significant importance to you and would be irreplaceable if lost or broken.

The incorporeal value you hold for this product is economically irrational but an integral trait of being human, proven by Khaneman and Tversky’s prospect theory. This attitude of value towards products is inherently circular, you would repair the watch if it stopped, you would refill and reuse the pen if it ran out of ink and you might ensure to rehome the t-shirt to a charity shop if you grew out of it. Each of these actions prevents an item from becoming perceived as obsolete, (re)circulating the value of the product and seeing circularity (re)valued through an increased reliance on facilities able to repair, refill or reuse products. How can this incorporeal value be imagined through a new industrial layer of (re)production?

Hadley James Clarke

hjc70@cam.ac.uk

63

Beyond Ecotourism Reconstructing Resilience in Ecotourism Destinations Smartly Sandakan, Malaysia

Ecotourism in East and Southeast Asia is unrivaled when it comes to the diversity of landscapes and ethnic cultures. However, under ecotourism’s name, a new type of mass tourism development is reaching further to the original untouched area without good tourism management and education. The destination infrastructure is not ready for the increasing number of people each year. For example, the lack of rubbish bins in Semporna makes the town plagued with lousy waste management and rubbish disposal, causing seas of rubbish. Meanwhile, the ecotourism industry is still dominated by global agencies with influence beyond the specific local environment. The influx of foreign capital intervention removes profits from the local area.

In order to avoid those from happening, this research would like to level the field for corporate providers and local businesses with lesser financial capacity, provide guidelines for local infrastructure spatial development and explore a kind of facility that incentive local innovation in the tourism industry where both tourists and accommodation providers can learn about ecotourism in the postcovid situation. One such facility is Living Lab. As an innovative arena, Living labs are well used in the European context to address the urban-scale problem. However, in East and Southeast Asia, they are still seldom researched and implemented. This research would like to fill the gap by investigating the role of the Living Labs in helping the ecotourism industry: what does it mean by design resilience in the ecotourism destination community, and what the difficulty is when promoting such institutions.

64

Lide Li

ll617@cam.ac.uk

Reinvention of Craftsmanship In Contemporary Cities: Shenzhen as an Example Shenzhen, China

This research project is about a re-examination of how middleincome cities foster skills in the post-industrial upgrades. The industrial upgrade which reduces low end labour-intensive industries has caused a big divergence in those cities between the highly skilled professionals and low skilled workers. Particularly those who have arrived in cities as recent migrants. Since before the industrial upgrade, the cities tend to disregard the skills that the migrants have of indigenous craftsmanship from their hometowns, and train them for mechanistic assembly lines. Now that in many of the middle-income cities the assembly lines are disappearing, there is a pending crisis with the up-skilling of the migrants and other low-income workers.

This project questions the current practices in the city of Shenzhen regarding migrant recruitment and training, which appear to be far from inadequate in responding to the changing needs of skills and skill training. Through a new conceptualisation of skills that view upskilling as a continuous and evolutionary process, this refined fabrication process aims to bridge the traditional and innovative architectural languages. It explores craft skills as a medium to reinterpret the changing manufacturing culture. It allows an opportunity for employment agency to act as an institution for migrant workers to grow urban identities through reinvention of craftsmanship. This involves connecting what the migrants have brought with them to the needs of high-tech, automated production and service jobs that require high levels of personal initiatives, inventiveness, and innovation.

Zizheng Wu

zw369@cam.ac.uk

65

Brand New Interrogating the Convergence of Retail Culture, Minority Heritage and Large-Scale Urban Regeneration.

London, UK

This project follows retail in its transition from a necessity to cultural activity, aiming to reframe retailised space in debates of cultural and heritage space. As retail becomes the output of creative ideas derived from and tested in urban environments, it becomes increasingly, a cultural expression. The project explores some ways these hybrid spaces can represent and house alternative heritage by way of previously uncredited cultural output. As contemporary multi-ethnic heritages start to demand social and academic recognition, how might they integrate into heritage at national level in developments designed to last an average of thirty years?

The project explores ways the metabolization of a city block in Barking town centre can produce a venue for cultural production, exchange, and consumption. This space aims to empower community members through the creation of indoor public space, enabling social participation, skill-sharing, and production of sitespecific identity. Whilst mediating policy-protected conservation and retail zones, it appropriates already disused space in the middle of the city block to create a negotiating community space between Barking’s retail centre and so-called ‘civic core’. What might a library of common goods look like if it contained the tools for expressing Barking’s identity to the rest of the city?

66

Kirsty Bekoe-Tabiri

kb620@cam.ac.uk

Amphibious Futures Tilbury, UK

Large and interconnected civic infrastructures fail during flood, and expensive projects to barricade flood waters from UK’s coastal areas will soon prove to be futile in the decades to come. This project imagines a future where amphibious building technologies are employed to create decentralised and mobile floating structures, which would then act as a resilient civic backbone to vulnerable coastal towns such as Tillbury.

Kimberley Lau

ksyl2@cam.ac.uk

67

Sanctuary in the City London, UK

68

This thesis explores the role played by places of worship within the Afro-Caribbean community in London and investigates how these black majority congregational spaces facilitate informal support networks within this group. Research looks to document the way these existing gatherings and networks operate spatially, investigating their urban condition and how this frames the practices that take place. The site is based in Southwark, South London, a culturally rich and vibrant borough home to the highest concentration of these churches in the country, and propositional work seeks out an architectural language through a collaborative approach, that looks to elevate and enhance these spaces of diasporic cultural expression.

Ama Ofori-Darko

a0492@cam.ac.uk

Post Burial Kensal Green Cemetery Woodland London, UK

Kensal Green Cemetery Woodland is in response to the ongoing existential and pragmatic crisis of how to appropriately memorialise, and dispose of, the dead within London. The proposal fundamentally interrogates the utility of the individual monument and re-frames funerary ritual through the lens of a collective responsibility to the environment and the future. The spatial implications of individual plots of earth, owned in perpetuity, have resulted in large swathes of green land, now enveloped by the city, being locked up by the strict lattice of individual manifestations of material memory. By decentralising the headstone as the key organisational principle of the cemetery, the proposal “returns” the land to a state of mythological woodland. Rather than continue the unsustainable practice of burial, or the environmentally disastrous option of cremation, individuals undergo a process called Natural Organic Reduction, reducing the body, on average, to one cubic yard of nutrient rich soil. Through careful ecological management, the resulting landscape orchestrates a series of pavilions and encounters that respond intimately to the multiple temporalities that circulate death, crafting an alternative funerary ritual in constant dialogue with nature, the cosmos, and a monistic sensibility towards life and death.

Matthew Lindsay

mjl205@cam.ac.uk

69

What if a M.E.G.A China An Innovative Urban Agenda — Migrant Entrepreneurship Growth Agenda for Chinese “Global City” Building with Resilience, Inclusiveness and Well-being Guangzhou, China

70

It is an obvious fact that there is a large foreign population living in China today, especially in some megacities. Guangzhou, the thirdlargest Chinese metropolitan with leading international platforms, attracts enormous foreign newcomers coming to seek fortune, among which a large number are from African countries, who play extraordinary roles in the trade of “globalization from below” between China, Africa, and other parts of the world, which is stimulated by the industries of “world factory” and “made in China” goods. Their main gathering area in Guangzhou is called “the Chocolate City” by people as a Sino-African economic zone, in which the life centre and socio-economic relations closely related to an urban village named Dengfeng Village. However, their settlement and informal economy encounter serious threats from the current Chinese urban village regeneration process.

I am intended to put forward an innovative urban framework and a migrant entrepreneurship growth agenda (M.E.G.A) for preserving the valuable socio-economic network between Chinese and immigrants which has already been established in and around Dengfeng Village in the “Chocolate City”. The conjugated regeneration strategy of the underline hub under the flyover is to look for the business innovations of immigrant entrepreneurs, provide socio-spatial resources for them, and then boost the economic and social matrix in all areas within China-Africa trade, which will provide important urban exploration in socio-economic, cultural-political and spatial aspects for China’s embrace of globalization.

Weixuan He

wh341@cam.ac.uk

Heritage not Inherited Shifting Value Systems for Alternative Futures Karachi, Pakistan

Pakistan was formed in 1947 through the partition of India and the departure of British rulers in South Asia. More than 70 years after its conception, the architectural legacy can still be seen amidst the new builds, however today they are recognisable primarily by their state of neglect. Architecture and design were key influences in upholding those systems of colonial control and oppression and consequently must emerge as primary sites in the struggles for decolonisation. This project looks at this decaying architectural heritage as an opportunity for climate change mitigation, and hopes to gather the conditions of the past and present to interpret an alternative future fashioned out of a new clay that repairs and assesses the value of the built environment in Karachi.

By shifting existing value systems through repair, reuse and adaption, then perhaps a change in building culture- with repair and maintenance being embedded in craftsmanship- can instigate the use of more low carbon materials such as bamboo, mud and lime. An architecture of repair could reduce emissions and facilitate a culturally infused urbanism of constant process.

Material studies explore various expressions of repair to actively embrace these inherent imperfections and build upon them as heritage in their own right. The use of heritage as a tool for resilience is further explored through its potential in wider flood mitigation.

Sophia Malik

sm2534@cam.ac.uk

71

MA U S

MAUS

MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies Students

Yulin Li Antonia Ioana Munteanu Ariel Koltun-Fromm Elisian Eleni Maria Ralli Dimitris Hartonas Qi Zhang Zhaoxi Li Abirami Murugappan Aoyu Zou Xiuchun Liang Runnan Li Dongsheng He Dimitri Brand Tianning Shao Camille Chabrol Anna Dobrawa Kicinska Kitya Mark Morgan Forde

Supervisors

Ingrid Schröder Maximilian Sternberg Ronita Bardhan Minna Sunnika-Blank Darshil Shah Emily So Ying Jin Koen Steemers Alan Short Nicholas Simcik Arese Irit Katz Felipe Hernandez

About The MPhil in Architecture and Urban Studies (MAUS) is a programme of advanced study on modern and contemporary architecture and the continued development of cities around the world. Students from a variety of academic backgrounds work in an interdisciplinary environment with urbanists, environmental specialists, architectural theorist and historians, as well as with design practitioners. In such an environment, students will explore a wide range of ideas, research methods and theoretical approaches in order to undertake critical and rigorous analysis of issues relating to both architecture and the challenges and complexity of the world’s rapidly changing cities. The course entertains close connections with the Masters in Architectural and Urban Design enabling research-driven dialogue with designers.

The course offers a flexible structure that is tailored to the needs of individual student’s research interests. Seminars and lectures are organised along two basic strands: 1) one focuses on sustainability and environmental design from a more technical point of view; 2) the other emphasises the socio- political and cultural context of architecture and the city with an approach rooted in the humanities and social sciences. Students may participate in both strands, but can also focus on one only. In the second term there is choice of more specialist seminars within both streams. Students are actively encouraged to explore issues across these basic disciplinary boundaries. The course asks students to expand upon their own experiences by pursuing research in their areas of interest.

Morgan Forde is the graduate representative for the MAUS 2020 -2021 cohort. In Fall 2021 she will begin her doctoral studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design

Utopia Inc. — How Machines for Living and Capital Combine in Comfort Town, a Post-Socialist Housing Project Kyiv, Ukraine

Built on the site of a toxic Soviet rubber factory in Kyiv, Comfort Town is a 700,370 square meter technicolor apartment complex built as a partnership between Archimatika, a Ukrainian architecture firm, and KAN Development. Launched in the heart of the 2008-2009 Great Recession, the project brief was to create “a residential block that would sell itself even in the time of crisis.” Central to the community’s sales pitch is a “European living standard” encapsulated in “PRO” open-plan apartments with modern finishes, exclusive amenities, and a surrounding security perimeter.

However, if one were to shift this technicolor landscape into greyscale, how different is Comfort Town from its older peers across the former Soviet Union? Despite its explicitly capitalist underpinnings in a neoliberal post-socialist Ukraine, the development has all the makings of a classic Soviet microrayon or micro-neighborhood and could therefore be characterized as a colorful reinvention of the past.

Despite their Modernist and utopian ambitions, the decay and stagnancy of Soviet-era microrayons has sparked a valorization of Western European apartment living as a social, urban-aesthetic repudiation of a failed socialist past. Comfort Town capitalizes on these perceptions despite looking as foreign in Kyiv’s Left Bank neighborhoods as it would anywhere in Western Europe.

This paper explores these urban historical and sociological contradictions through the following questions: How is Comfort Town’s promise of European living architecturally informed by the Soviet microrayon typology? And how is Kyiv’s neoliberal, developerdriven model of development creating or foreclosing potential futures for the city’s post-socialist urban development?

74

Morgan Forde

mf724@cam.ac.uk

Synagogue Stories of Schum: Seeking Narrative in the Rhineland Sites of German-Jewish Memory-Work Schum: Speyer, Worms, Mainz, Germany

The synagogue sites of the Rhineland cities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz, collectively known as Schum, were equally reduced to rubble by 1945. Today, these sites diverge wildly in their postwar treatments: Speyer’s is a preserved ruin, Worms’s a historic reconstruction and Mainz’s a radical new build. My research into how each of these historically and culturally linked cities developed their synagogue sites differently reveals the diverse interactions of these different physical solutions with local memory-work. What are the postwar memory-works of the respective synagogue sites? For whom? And in reading these varied sites and their respective memory-works together in conversation, how can we better understand present-day German synagogues, as effective architecture, as contributing members of the urban fabric and as mediators of the past? In investigating these questions, I argue that these Schum synagogues provide counternarratives to the Holocaust as a rupture in memory performance, that they by design concentrate and display highly diverse and contradictory struggles for commemorative agency and that they exert real and tangible influence on the contemporary urbanisms they inhabit.

I adopt a form of rigorous storytelling, where building becomes the focus of a historical narrative arc. This expands the analytic lens beyond historical fact and brings into the fold historical fiction, misrepresentation, inaccuracy and amnesia, which are just as important and have just as profound an impact on contemporary memory-work. Included in this anthology are the stories of the subversive infiltration of Jewish memory-work in a German mastery project in Worms, of the acquiescence of radical Jewish architecture to German memory-work needs in Mainz, and of a deceptive division of Jewish memory-work in Speyer.

These narratives, which are not exclusive, are then brought into conversation with one another to generate a more urban and regional understanding of the memory-work effects these spaces have.

Ariel Koltun-Fromm

ak2285@cam.ac.uk

75

Seeing is believing. This is the philosophy I have carried with me as I look to develop methodologies to render vulnerable groups contributions to socio-economic ecologies visually defensible.

My research applies modes of representation which help people appreciate what is often hard to seeprocesses of marginalisation.

Securing Inclusive Representation of QTIPOC Spaces in London’s Urban Planning Initiatives

Upgrading the city is paradoxically progressive and exclusive.

In London, LGBTQ+ venues have disproportionately suffered.

The Greater London Authority (GLA) has set out key initiatives, including digital representation, spatial strategies and charters to protect their cultural output. Queer people of colour (QTIPOC) have, however, been documented both in media (i-D: Abraham, 2017), and research (Campkin & Marshall, 2017; 2018; Mompelat, 2018) as creating separate spaces to their white counterparts to tackle exclusions in LGBTQ+ venues. Local government strategies must reflect this.

London, UK

Theorizing inclusive representation of QTIPOC spaces in urban planning is crucial for realising the present-day Mayoral projects for futuring London as ‘LGBTQ+ inclusive’, a ‘cultural capital’ and a ‘smart city’. Considering the exploration of how these administrative mechanisms could serve QTIPOC communities occurs at a knowledge institution, it requires working from a position of institutional allyship. Epistemically, this involved using queer urbanisms as a point of entry to then situate Queer of Color Critique (QOCC) as the intersectional centre of urban discourse.

It further the theoretical agenda of intersectional code studies (Elwood, 2020), by interrogating normativity in virtual and physical London as the economic instrument which perpetuates QTIPOC erasure and marginality in urban practise.

Practically, this involved engaging the QTIPOC community in London achieved through a survey and an interview with the President of UK Black Pride. Their participation shed light on their current initiatives, which guided the data interpretation during the second stage of research that sought to better define QTIPOC spaces city-wide, in order to render them visually defensible.

From here, a social-justice oriented, sequential mixed-method study emerged, which will provide material for UK Black Pride campaigners lobbying to local government. This thesis will then act as bridging capitol (hooks, 1984) between the centre of decision-making and marginalised narratives of QTIPOC, to cultivate transformative action.

76

Antonia-Ioana Munteanu

aim40@cam.ac.uk

Impact of Participatory Budgeting on Citizens’ Agency in the Development of Public Space in Warsaw Warsaw, Poland

Introduction of participatory budgeting in Warsaw in the 2010s was aimed at pioneering a new direction for the development of urban democracy. The municipality perceived it as providing citizens with a tool to themselves establish a direction in which Warsaw’s urban planning should develop. Almost a decade later, the implications of the process for democracy and the urban landscape have hardly been analysed.

This paper focuses on the impact of participatory budgeting on public space. Taking under consideration complex relationship between the society, the government and public space in Warsaw, the paper analyses collected quantitative and qualitative data in order to question participatory budgeting’s impact on the society’s agency in the city and its effect on the public space.

It argues that participatory budgeting, due to its nonsignificant scale and not fully developed procedure, has very little impact on Warsaw’s urban democracy and the direction of the city’s development strategy. However, it suggests that participatory budgeting strengthens citizens’ agency in defining local public space. While it might not be a measure to enforce citizens’ “right to the city”, it might provide them with a “right to their everyday local space”.

Anna Dobrawa Kicinska adk48@cam.ac.uk

77

I am interested in humanistic studies of urban phenomena, especially the role of mass media in the urban system.

I’d like to critically read the contemporary society and to present the underrepresented population. Newcomer in architecture and urban studies, but wishing to keep going this way.

How Does Digital Media Participate in the Formation of Urban Experience? Studies of VR-facilitated Historic Preservation, Urban Environment in the Video Game, and the Internet Cafés.

China

78

As we approach the post-pandemic age, it’s time to reevaluate the ways that digital media has irreversibly changed the urban environment and social relations. My MAUS essays and dissertation are my initial steps to study the digitized urban experience and society. My Essay 1 studied a leading digital heritage preservation project in China: the Digital Yuanmingyuan. By studying the project’s decision and methods to preserve the ruins and digitally restore the historical scenery, I discussed how violence and culture is understood and explained in historic narratives, and how digital preservation could help build a critical understanding toward the narrative discrimination between violence and culture in history.

My Essay 2 studied the Night City in the newly released game Cyberpunk 2077. By comparing Night City with Los Angeles in reality, in scientific imaginations and in the Los Angeles School of Urbanism, this essay discusses how game reproduces urban experience and reflects a further understanding of postmodern urbanity.

My dissertation studies the Internet Cafés in China. The Internet Café is special because it is a real urban site where the infrastructure and services facilitate customers to focus and linger in the virtual world. The social relations generated by the Internet Café simultaneously contain publicity and privacy, collectivity and individuality, connection and separation. I conducted a study of the history of Internet Café’s development within the broader context of China’s social and economic transformation. I collected first-hand data through site observation, neighbourhood analysis, and survey of the Internet Café operators and users. Through the research, I discovered that Internet Cafés in China become a stratified social system, which serves people from different regions and of different consumption capacity. The grassroots population, especially those who pursue the Esports and Ecommerce trades, could climb up the social ladder and migrate from rural to urban area with the help of the Internet Café network. The hierarchical structure of the Internet Cafés in both time and space, therefore, reflects the urbanization process of China and the social and spatial mobility of the Chinese population.

Yulin Lu

yl755@cam.ac.uk

Tracing the Symbolist Dichotomy of Art Nouveau: From Zola to Guimard Paris, France

The Parisian fin-de-siècle is defined by a dichotomy between rationalism and spiritualism, traceable in various cultural products of the time. This study follows this dichotomy in the context of Art Nouveau, from the theoretical framework of the movement to its visual manifestation in illustrations and architectural space.

The aforementioned tension lies at the origins of Art Nouveau and is reflected in its reinterpretation of the Middle Ages. Ideas expressed earlier in the century by Viollet-le-Duc, John Ruskin and William Morris form the conceptual foundation of Art Nouveau and present Middle Ages as a basis for the creation of a new architecture. These influences, however, are often at odds with each other, expressing different views on the meaning of ornament and the role of new technologies for the development of a new style.

To explore this inherent tension in Art Nouveau, this dissertation examines Emile Zola’s symbolist novel Le Rêve (1893), illustrated

by Art Nouveau artist Carlos Schwabe. In this novel, a renowned Naturalist author and supporter of Modernism deviates from his convictions to portray a romantic world of dreams. Zola employs a medievalist receptacle for the exploration of this dichotomy, introducing Symbolism as a means to reconcile the tangible reality with an imaginary world of dreams. His collaboration with Carlos Schwabe provides a paradigm of Art Nouveau’s visualization of this tension through Symbolism.

The collaboration of Zola and Schwabe is interpreted as analogous to the architecture of Hector Guimard; in his built works, the architect deviates from his rationalist principles to create symbolist interiors. Spatial attributes derived from the analysis of Schwabe’s illustrations are transferred to the context of Guimard’s interiors to explore an obscure aspect of his work: a spiritual disposition that Guimard does not refer to in his positivist writings and, yet, is evident in his symbolic architectural expression. The dichotomy observed in the medievalist origins of Art Nouveau appears to have been further abstracted in Guimard’s work: it is no longer expressed through an explicitly medievalist imagery; rather, it turns to symbolism, suggesting an evolution of this tension from the origins of Art Nouveau to its mature architectural expression.

Elisian Eleni Maria Ralli

eemr3@cam.ac.uk

79

Mobility, Control and Resistance: London Street Sellers from 1850 to 1950 London, UK

This dissertation addresses the changing mobility of street sellers in London from the mid 19th to mid 20th century. During this time period the culture, identity and demographics of London street seller community changed significantly, as did the scope and breadth of their movement through urban space.

The first section of the paper examines the different types of movement street sellers engaged in during this time period, and how this mobility both responds to and affects the rhythms of city life, at different hours of the day, days of the week, and seasons of the year. Street sellers are closely tuned into the various cycles of production and flows of city life, and develop an understanding of urban life by being exposed to many different people and places in the city and its outskirts.

The second section looks at how authorities attempted to regulate this movement over time. I argue that regulations placed on street sellers correspond to evolving attitudes about mobility in urban space. For instance, in the 1920s, regulations attempt to restrict the movement of street sellers between boroughs, and in the 1930s regulations prioritize the circulation of cars over mixed uses of streets.

The third section is concerned with how regulations are resisted by street sellers and implemented by authorities. Street sellers organize into unions that use a wide array of tactics to resist restrictions on their use of city streets. However, once restrictions are put in place, their implementation by authorities are uneven and are not enforced uniformly. Street sellers also invent a number of tactics of resistance that use their mobility and visibility to their advantage. I argue that though plans to restrict street sellers are in place, the reality of their impact on the movement of street sellers depends on a process of negotiation and resistance between various authorities, urban actors and street sellers.

80

Camille Chabrol

cejc3@cam.ac.uk

Walking Against the Tag: the Restrictions and Resistance of Electronically Tagged Migrants in Croydon

This thesis draws on qualitative research conducted while walking with two tagged migrants, Mobo and Ervin, in Croydon, London. The electronic tag very specifically undermines the relationships that these migrants have formed with the city, so that they are suddenly lost in a familiar space. Following in the footsteps of these migrants, I will demonstrate that the whilst the tag ‘doubly-displaces’ already displaced individuals, there are still opportunities to claim inclusion in the city. Walking in London, even when your spatial realities are confined, can still be a movement generative with radical potential.

Croydon, UK

Kitya Mark

kpgm2@cam.ac.uk

81

Image credits

p73

forecourt of Manuel Herz’s new synagogue in Mainz with columns of old synagogue in foreground, copyright held by Iwan Baan.

p75

Budżet obywatelski w Dzielnicy Śródmieście m.st. Warszawy, Facebook

p77

The symbolist interiors of Hector Guimard. Le Castel Beranger portfolio, Hector Guimard 1898.

p78

László Moholy-Nagy, photographs published in The Street Markets of London, by Mary Benedetta, 1936

p79

Mobo, one of the protagonists of my research

MAUD/MAUS exhibition leads 2021: MAUD 5th Joseph Marchbank MAUD 4th Michal Saniewski MAUS Morgan Forde

82

catalogue design: print:

Benjamin Carter digitalprinting.co.uk

further information www.arct.cam.ac.uk www.cambridge-design-research-studio.com social media Twitter Instagram

@cdr_studio @cambridge_drs

83

MAUD 5 Karen Young Jacqueline Tsang Jefferson Chan Kexin Feng James Smith Vishmi Jayawardene Laura Turner Louis Lupien Lewis Shannon Charlotte Airey Irene Carlucci Khensani de Klerk Tong Jiang Helena Jordan Shirley Lo Joseph Marchbank Raghav Rayasam Chelsea Sia Stephen Smith Jennifer Smith Zhonghan Tan Elliot Zheng Zhou MAUD 4 Hadley James Clarke Zizheng Wu Kirsty Bekoe-Tabiri Lide Li Rachel Kelly Yanny Lung Sophia Malik Lou Elena Bouey Benjamin Carter Sebastian Fathi Grey Grierson Bijou Harding Finnegan Harries Weixuan He Yousuf Khalil Kimberley Lau Matthew Lindsay Ryan Myers Ama Ofori-Darko Stephen Pearcy Ellie Piper Joe Ridealgh Michal Saniewski Charlotte Smith Kieran Tam Iiris Tähti Toom Zizheng Wu MAUS Yulin Li Antonia Ioana Munteanu Ariel Koltun-Fromm Elisian Eleni Maria Ralli Dimitris Hartonas Qi Zhang Zhaoxi Li Abirami Murugappan Aoyu Zou Xiuchun Liang Runnan Li Dongsheng He Dimitri Brand Tianning Shao Camille Chabrol Anna Dobrawa Kicinska Kitya Mark Morgan Forde

MA U D

84

/

MA U S

Department of Architecture University of Cambridge 1-5 Scroope Terrace Cambridge, CB2 1PX