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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 Open Reuse sites.
The building is located above a row of five sweet shops on Whitechapel Road, providing the back of the house for the street market and bringing the traders together under the same roof, where they can rest, cook and eat together as a community.
A fried chicken education centre focusing on healthy nutrition and food education among young people in Whitechapel.
Drawing on the history of making in Whitechapel, this project proposes a weaving studio for artists adjoining a public workshop for pocket weaving. The overarching scheme is a patchwork of courtyards, reflecting the original composition of the site.
The building proposes a space that can provide sustainable healthy and fresh aquatic products to the residents of the Whitechapel and Brick Lane areas.
The building embodies and represents the exchange of conversation, connecting the two structures through music.