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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 infill sites.
Situated over the entrance to Whitechapel Station, this project provides temporary respite through social and creative processes. The project reuses clay from the ground for collaborative community-phased construction of the building.
The proposal is a preventative form of medicine that stops oil from reaching the sewers, responding to the problem of the Whitechapel fatberg. Users walk amongst machinery, learning about the process of recycling waste cooking oil into biodiesel.
The project aims to create a rehabilitation centre for young adult/ adolescent long-term patients with lower leg trauma injuries. The centre acts as a sanctuary, providing the safety of medical space to heal alongside a tranquil domestic community.
The proposal provides a creative space for dementia patients. Workshop spaces and exhibition areas help to focus on remembering through familial space.
A physiotherapy clinic and rehabilitation centre, positioned over the railway of Whitechapel Station. The building acts as a device for rehabilitation and sports therapy with increasing levels of difficulty as patients and users move up the building.
The project is designed around exercises needed for physical therapy for muscular dystrophy patients.
This project provides a nursery for traditional Bangladeshi medicinal plants, alongside an over-the-counter pharmacy and a medicinal laboratory. The building also serves as a community bonding centre.
Whitechapel Road is one of the most polluted roads in London. The building proposal aims to help purify the local air and treat people with respiratory issues.
Through providing a break room that can be used discretely and away from the public eye, this building celebrates a hidden workforce in Whitechapel, the station workers.
This cataract clinic offers a personal and unique experience that guides the patient to the operating theatre with the use of tactility, light, and angularity.
Percolate and purify: brewing sustainability in carbon-infused walls.
This herbal tea house celebrates the power of herbs and spices. It provides users with the opportunity to heal and prevents illness through herbal infusions, as opposed to conventional medicine.
The project proposes to provide restrooms and access to water for Whitechapel Market, transforming London's lavatory landscape.
This project aims to unite the local community through the process of storytelling. The building will act as a publication centre, inviting the community to come in and re-tell the stories of their past that shaped the people they are today.
The building is designed to collect and filter water, catering to the market stall owners' needs. It allows them to regularly wash their produce to remove any toxins, as well as offering them a private space to sit and store their belongings.