Standard-Non Standard-Luxury
At Home In The City
The studio explores ways of living in the city today focusing simultaneously on the urban and the domestic. Looking at issues of housing from a multi-scalar lens allows us to understand residential buildings, homes, inhabitants and their cities as part of a system, highlighting the interdependent relationship between the urban and its dwellers.
A systematic, typological approach is at the core of the studio’s analytical processes in relation to housing design problems: we examine what sort of domesticity, shared space system and city pattern residential building types produce. This ultimately leads to understanding what lifestyles, collective experience, and urbanity they represent.
In addition to that, the studio builds on students’ personal experiences in relation to their homes and modes of habitation as a way to challenge their preconceived ideas on housing and critique current design standards. With our changing work patterns, shortage of space, money and the looming environmental crisis we ask the students to define their position between the absolute necessary and the utmost desired through their design proposal. Learning from mistakes and successes of precedents, when it comes to designing our future homes what will be the new standard?
SEM1 Inner City: Reimagined Estates
In the first semester, students developed housing projects proposing new design strategies to utilise the below-the-plinth garage space of existing housing estates in the City of London.
The studio projects analysed these estates as a way to interrogate existing and past spatial standards and housing formulas. By transforming this unused urban infrastructure and extending the existing estates could we provide environmentally, socially, economically coherent solutions for redevelopment? The designs had to redefine the relationship with the residential complex above, as well as its connections with the city.
SEM2 Suburbia: Peripheral Dreams
In the search for new modes of habitation students used and further expanded on the architectural ideas developed in the first semester on standard, non standard and luxurious ways of living. Understanding the local, global and historical issues around suburban living, design investigations reimagined a piece of the London periphery, the undefined, very sparsely built edge of New Barnet at the scale of the master plan and a housing estate. Students were asked to speculate on what the future suburbs would look like and what lifestyle will they offer? In order to analyse the context from various aspects students collaborated with urban planning students to form the basis of their design agenda.
London Studio Students
Imogen Brown
Catriona Butters
Yue Che
Xuanyang Chen
Enlai Cheng
Adam Clarence
Greta Kabashi
Kamila Kleczek
Woonyoung Lee
Lingbo Li
Telmuun Magsarjav
Atia Raja
Genoveva Scurtu
Xinyu Shen
Rushma Thapa
Yubang Wu
Jiawei Xu
Sabbina Yacoob
Lujia Yang
Daniel Zhang-Baganz
Maryam Lashhab
Studio Team
Johanna Muszbek
Pietro Pezzani
Urban Design
Manuela Madeddu
Critics
Dave King
Prof Neil Jackson
Prof Nicholas Ray
Joao Ruiv