T2 Manifesto #1

"The neatness of architecture is its seduction; it defines, excludes, limits, separates from the ‘rest‘- but it also consumes. It exploits and exhausts the potentials that can be generated finally only by urbanism, and that only the specific imagination of urbanism can invent and renew."

Rem Koolhaas "Whatever Happened to Urbanism" in SMLXL

I grew up in High Wycombe. Before university I spent a year at Hamiltons Architects (Now BFLS – recent winners of the prestigious Carbuncle Cup). I studied Part 1 at Manchester School of Architecture. I worked at Rivington Street Studio after graduating. Last week I completed MA Urban Design at UEL.

This year I am interested in exploring:

“Uniformity is not simply an inherent by-product of machine production: it results from centralizing design control.”

Habraken, The Structure of the Ordinary, p 273

Strategies and processes that increase the number of actors directly involved in the creation of the built environment

The interface between ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom-up’ development

“A typological point of departure has always been the basic assumption in almost all building. As such it has invariably oscillated between the universality of civilization on the one hand, and the rootedness of culture on the other.”

Frampton. K, “Luogo, Forma Identita Cultrale”. Domus 673 (1986) p 20.

The potential of proscriptive (rather than prescriptive) rules and spatial ranges to create conditions of flexibility, responsiveness and innovation

Incremental development (on all scales) where stages of growth are not stages of completion. All instances, small and large, represent integral wholes

Harnessing the implicit knowledge of citizens to structure urban environment and establish the context and limits of design

Ways of finding common ground between disparate urban forms