X-Ray: The Embodied City, Railway Roof Sites

Project details

Programme

Year 1

This year, for the building project, the brief asked us to investigate how buildings can be designed to nurture health and wellbeing. Health and wellbeing should be considered something that incorporates both animate and inanimate, medical and non-medical elements and forms of architecture. This is explored through both conventional and alternative practices, encompassing the mystical, profane and spiritual elements of buildings, as both sick and healthy constructions. We can relate health to active and non-active practices of the body, including the foods we grow and eat, the quality of air and the particles we breathe and the flora and fauna surrounding us.

We stepped into the shoes of the architect-surgeon, as we learnt to diagnose the city, our sites and their surrounding environments, while we dreamed about alternative realities, envisioning what a site can host or become in order to help the occupants and the wider city. The project worked on three scales: one-to-one actions and occupations for the body; the building as body; and the building within the embodied city.

The projects below chose Railway and roof sites.

Students

Jiahe (Ryan) Shao Year 1
Nga Chi Gigi (Gigi) Lane Year 1 The Social Agency Prize
Harriet Rose (Hattie) Wilson Year 1
Allysha Binti Alaq Year 1
Zareef Khan Year 1
Stanislav Christopher (Stan) Luo Year 1 The Social Agency Prize
Jan Siwicki Year 1
Oscar John Brice Year 1
Pia Sophia Greenway Year 1
Gracie Eve Whitter Year 1

Allysha Alaq, The Intermediary

An alternative Hong Kong Embassy to support incoming Hong Kong immigrants.

Gigi Lane, Public Cleansing Facilities for Women

The project aims to provide a public cleansing facility for women. More specifically, it proposes a reinvention of the traditional Western public bathrooms by incorporating the idea of wudu (Muslim cleansing ritual before their 5 daily prayers).

Jan Siwicki, Whitechapel Rail Midnight Market

The project generates a social space, activated and operating after the last train of the London District Line service passes through Whitechapel. The market stalls above the rails will open for the night, creating a vibrant night street market.

Luke Grbesa, Fungi Origins

The proposal is a mushroom farm that uses leftover coffee grounds collected from local coffee shops as a growing medium for mushrooms. The building collects and recycles food waste from Whitechapel market using anaerobic digesters to produce energy.

Pia Greenway, The Seedhouse

A proposal to create a seed house incorporated into the context and the embodied fabric of Whitechapel Road, a busy area with transport, market and social activity.

Ryan Shao, An Archive for Urban Memory

Inspired by the Jewish migration history of Whitechapel, the project proposes a community hall which accommodates the local community and is designed around a multi-faith design principle.

Stan Luo, Surgeon’s Salvation: A Retreat for an Overworked Surgeon

The project is a house for an extremely overworked surgeon, examining the overwork culture in the UK medical sector.

William Warwick, The Hedonic Botox Bar

The Hedonic Botox Bar is a project exploring humans’ need for consumption. Through a cosmetic surgery programme with a sinister surgeon as the antagonist, the concept of hedonistic and hedonic paradoxes is explored through architecture.