Bad Language: Cultural Utility
This year in studio 3.6 has focused heavily on a renovation project. We have decided to create a creative educational programme for our building. It is an existing car park which is based in Shoreditch, in the shadow of London which used to be rich in art and culture but has slowly been pushed out due to gentrification. I wanted to design a building to encourage local communities to bring back that culture, hence my building’s function will be an architectural school with plenty of public areas to give back to the local communities. My design proposal will consider heavily based around the existing structure and keep as much as possible to encourage the aspect of sustainability and any changes and additions will be carefully designed as I wish to accommodate any future changes to the function of the building. This means the primary structure will remain for any future redevelopment.
The site is currently in a triangular shape where the long side faces a busy street called Great Eastern Street. Usually, the building consists of a back and front, but I intend to consider the three sides as front access to the building and the first two floors will be heavily focused on finding ways to give that space back to the public. This is a decision I heavily fixate on as I want to bring this cultural community back again and multiple ways of doing that are creating communal areas and cafes. The benefit of this location is that the building is standalone with streets surrounding it. This creates the building to catch people’s eyes as soon as entering the area.
The size of the existing building is very generous and so is the front outdoor space. In my design, I wanted to maintain spacious areas for public access and front entrances that encourage people to either walk through it or use it as a meetup point and share the space with students.
