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This year UG5 looked towards Hastings. The East Sussex seaside town has a fraught relationship with London, its larger, richer neighbour. Recent gentrification has caused an unmanageable situation for the local community, unbalancing the housing market and impinging on the distinctive cultural identity of the region. This imbalance has led to a growing antipathy for new arrivals from London who have been given the unfortunate moniker FILTH (Failed in London, Try Hastings).
Our aim for the year was to design locally integrated, resilient and uplifting spaces for residents, challenging gentrification and displacement. Students proposed new infrastructures that borrow ideas of integration from a number of different sources.
There is no silver bullet solution to issues caused by gentrification. UG5 has therefore sought collectively to exhibit a diverse collection of designs that, when viewed all together, represent the most exciting possibilities in rethinking the town, while acknowledging wider problems stemming from development.
Radical forms of architecture are born out of simple marks on paper, and the unit embraces experimental drawing techniques in search of such forms. Each student began the process by choosing an original artwork which itself has a strong link to our chosen site. These artworks formed the basis of a deeply contextual experimental drawing series which continued throughout the year, developing into a variety of meaningful architectural languages.
By critically examining these artworks, re-creating and extrapolating the marks that make them, UG5 students have created their own individual, unique drawing languages that have suggested entirely unexpected architecture with deep roots in the stories of Hastings.