Unit 08: Love For One’s Own Home

Tutors: Fani Kostourou, Sepehr Zhand

This studio focuses on the intersection between architecture, music, and love. It uses music genres that has been born in unloved urban settings (South Bronx -American hip-hop, East London – grime, Parisian banlieues – French rap), to research, design and reimagine housing for disadvantaged populations. It is structured in three parts. The first part [CARTOGRAPHY] invites students to ‘learn by doing’; conducting research and drawing bodily cartographies that link the lived and built space in different urban housing projects around the world based on the music genres that emerged in or associated with them. In the second phase [NARRATIVE], students theoretically and graphically synthesize the previous cartographies into case-specific narratives that build a case for how we ‘learn from places’, while informing the individual briefs for the following and main project. The last part [DESIGN] develops large-scale individual design proposals for a new urban housing scheme that accommodates disadvantaged populations in the currently under-demolition Robin Hood Gardens estate site in Poplar, London. Each student proposes their own brief and design response to it.

Unit Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/wsa_unit8/?hl=en

Study Trip Video (Ksenia Davydova)
https://www.instagram.com/tv/B48ZpXHpel3/?hl=en