Unit 7 is dedicated to metropolitan architecture. This isn’t about sustaining a romantic myth of the “traditional city”, nor is it about inventing the “city of the future”. It’s about evolving, augmenting and working on the city that exists.
Students worked with significant sites in central Cardiff, each with existing planning permission for large speculative buildings of limited programmatic and urban contribution. Their work proactively engages in the territory of commercial architecture to propose alternatives to this status quo. They have taken responsibility for designing substantial urban buildings that will accommodate unknowable citizens in unknown combinations.
The notions of specificity and indeterminacy have guided proposals that respond precisely to the reality of each site while remaining open-ended in terms of uses. Schemes have been refined though scenario-testing to support a range of functions over time. Students have taken a strategic and economical approach to building design, with an emphasis on offering pleasure in use.
This is not the kind of architecture that overwhelms with signature. Nor is it the kind that one exhausts after a few encounters. It is about architecture that is at once robust and accommodating, pragmatic and enigmatic – and which always appears in public, no matter who owns it.