Projective Cities
MPhil Programme in Architecture and Urban Design
Architectural Association School of Architecture




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Projects
01. Urban

Housing & Care Cooperatives in the Netherlands
Spatial Diagrams of Cluster Living
by Gianna Bottema
The dissertation investigates the typological transformation of elderly accommodation into decentralised models of care in place in the district. Currently, community-led care networks such as Buurtzorg, District Care, and care cooperatives are emerging through new legislation in order to encourage individual care agency and to collectivise care responsibility within the district. The shift in healthcare politics towards care in place emphasises the dwelling as a hybrid of public and private initiatives, linking
forms of assistance and dependency with everyday life. The collective organisation of care in the home environment introduces typological questions about the organisation of dwelling according to new protocols, procedures and common activities of care. How can the housing cooperative as a spatial and social framework organise collectivised care work, household activities and social support networks within the district?

This dissertation argues for an investigation into the threshold conditions of dwelling according to the social and spatial relations of care activities (therapy, care work, reproductive work, assistance and retreat). By proposing the thresholds as a key design tool, the dissertation aims to challenge the separation, classification and segregation of people according to age, illness and gender. The wellbeing of the human body
relates to the different dimensions of space and emphasises multi-scalar relations that stretch from the district to the domestic. Through an investigation of the different parts of the home, the project proposes to translate common activities and tasks into a collection of fragments, zones of interaction and threshold conditions. Accordingly, spatial design principles of cluster living reorganise the parts, and redefine notions of intimacy, privacy and the interior.

Read the full dissertation HERE
From Factory to Fireside
Dwelling with Small Manufacturing in London
by Yi Shi

The thesis takes the urban small-scale factories as its vehicle to interrogate the dynamic role of urban production space to uncover the malleable correlations between our working and living. Based on the context of London and taking the mixed-uses typology as the object of investigation, The thesis investigates the abject history of the rise and fall of urban manufacturing to construct a grand narrative of the city's material reality through a series of case studies, which reveal the spatial and socio-political implications of the small manufacturing in search of new living models that ask for reconciliation between factory and city.

The thesis is structured by three interlinking chapters: manufactured city, outdated work and the compensatory fantasy. Each chapter finds its conclusions by synthesizing the research into a product of design. These chapters set the stage for three explicit research paths that link small manufacturing with urban habitual through reading the urban configurations, labour politics and material culture. It offers a lens through which one can analysis the relationship between individuals, their work, and the rapidly evolving landscape of urban material production.

Moreover, the project not simply advocates reintroducing industry back to the city, nor intends to celebrate the progress of production methods in the digital era, but inquires inward on the fundamental contradictions embedded in the act of making, asking for reconciliation between factory and city.

Read the full dissertation HERE







  
                                      
Care Devolution and Inter-Household Cooperation
Towards a Cluster Model of Common Institution of Land, Dwelling and Care
by Clinton Thedyardi Prawirodiharjo

The dissertation investigates alternative forms of community care in the context of London. In recent times, London municipalities have been responsible for delivering social care services for local communities, the majority in collaboration with private or volunteer agencies. Although the NHS delivers a high standard of service, health and care provision in London is still facing challenges regarding limited services, neglect and managerial barriers. Primarily, these issues are the legacy of the UK’s centralised system of care and the emergence of contemporary issues such as increasingly diverse communities, a growing elderly population and a rise in demand for mental health services. In response, communityled care initiatives organised in collaboration with local municipalities and care agencies are springing up in London in the form of daycare centres, senior clubs, various associations and volunteer carers to provide collective modes of care. At the same time, the provision of land by the Community Land Trust raises another possibility for establishing community-led care as a public-private project by shifting personal care in the dwelling unit to a neighbourhood care model.

Reflecting on the ambitions of the 2017 London Health and Care Devolution Programme, the project proposes the creation of a cooperative mutual care organisation to enhance integration between the local council and vulnerable communities. Through a cooperative strategy, the dissertation aims to respond to the spatial and managerial challenges of social care and community services provision at the neighbourhood scale. The research traces the history of the architecture of collective care in London and revisits alternative approaches in terms of social structure, forms of sharing and daily rituals through a collective way of living. The dissertation rethinks care through cluster forms as a typological and urban question to generate new possibilities for community care activities and protocols.

Read the full dissertation HERE 02. Rural
Re-connecting Rural-EnvironThe Cooperative Structure of the Mountain Villages in Beijing

by Kaiwen Chen



In China, the traditional village has long been closely associated with the environment, which gathered idyllic imagination from an external gaze, represented by portrayals of rural lives from Tao Yuanming's idyllic poems from the early fifth century, written as a result of his political deportation, to the rural communes of modern time during the Down to the Countryside Movement between the 1950s and 80s. This idyllic imagination continues to be strong in the current trend that calls for a return to the countryside, where ideas such as self-sufficiency, back to the mountain, and seclusion have taken on different forms of rural idealisation as the relationship between urban-rural shifted over time.
However, from the internal perspective of village life, the idealization are not a desire for landscape, but rather a focus on pragmatism of village and it environ. The fever of immersing in nature, opening up wasteland and creating quaint society reveal the potential of this traditional form of live to cooperate not only within one another, but also with the environment. The research is based on the mountain villages of Beijing as a case to retrace the co-environ village life. Historically, this reveals the spatially cooperative activities of different groups, such as families, kinship networks, and production collectives, as well as family gatherings, farming, and festival rituals. These daily rituals occur in spaces closely linked to the environment, such as hamlets, farmlands, and natural spots. They are not nature, but exist as border territories, thus defining a continuous and hybrid landscape.
The disseration rediscovers and deconstructs the daily rituals of village cooperation; By articulating the co-environ devices, the project unravels the diagrammatic relations that describe the contact between collective organization and cooperative space.

Read the full dissertation HERE



From Autarchy to Synergy
A Look at the Spanish Countryside from 1950s to 2020s
by Clara Asperilla Arias
This dissertation examines the production of rurality through conditions of exodus between abandonment and colonisation1 in the “Hollowed Out Spain” across three key historical periods: 1950s, 1980s and currently the 2020s. The formation of the Spanish countryside as revealed in these periods shares the extended trend of rural depopulation in Europe, but presents a singular and intense case of demographic decline driven by specific sociopolitical, architectonic and territorial impositions.

Shrinking villages have not been able to retain productive ages, particularly the female population. Older generations have dwelled in extensive houses, and new generations keep exiting the countryside. State policies have been incapable of offering sufficient educational, cultural, health and care infrastructures for those who remain, prompting more of the younger generations to leave. These persistent conditions of exodus have produced particular subjects of rurality, manifested most profoundly across female generations having to settle or unsettle their roles within the dominant, patriarchal framework.

The recognition of a gender bias within this process of ongoing rural exodus provides the departing point in the construction of the connections between the landscape and the female body, the political control of territory and female subjects. The thesis will take a gender perspective throughout the whole dissertation, therefore the histories of colonisation and desertification of the Spanish countryside will be narrated through its female subjects, who conduct the different scales of the research from dwelling, household, settlement, to territory.


Read the full dissertation HERE

Proximal RelationsForms of Settlement, Dwelling, and Territory
in the Opole-Silesia, Poland

by Wojciech Mazan


The thesis is recognizing the contemporary Polish countryside as a product of the state’s explicit social and spatial experiments. The central aim of is to conceptualize the rural landscape as a close relation to settlements, territories, and dwellings. With a focus on a particular type of ‘linear settlement’, the thesis starts by tracing through its transformations, implications upon a territory and the introduction of distinctive dwelling typologies. This reveals a chronology of transformations enacted through a long history of the state’s endeavours to colonize rural areas. The reconceptualization of the ‘linear settlement’ from a contemporary perspective offers a new understanding of their instrumentality, away and beyond their romanticization, where the countryside is read as space of struggle and resilience, rather than an idyllic landscape. The thesis studies past and present patterns of growth caused by internal migration from urban towards rural Poland which consist of 93% of the entire country. The timeline in question spans over three periods: early capitalist (interwar, 1918-1939), socialist (post-war, 1946-1993) and late capitalist (post-transformation, 1993-today). Each one can be read through a historical event triggering a change, a strategy introduced by the state, which effectively resulted in an architectural object – a physical embodiment of these processes – being introduced as an element of a settlement and enabled as a trace upon the land of transformation. The thesis proposes a reading of the rural landscape through the focus on changing relations between forms of dwelling and labour, which have often been overshadowed by the concerns of administrative division and political influence. Ultimately, the proposal claims that the countryside is not only to be understood through disciplines of sociology, demography, anthropology, and geography, but it can also be understood through architecture and become an independent project of architecture. By reconceptualizing the close relations between the three ingredients of a rural landscape, the project challenges the urban-rural dichotomy and questions the categorization of land in the present Polish context. In effect, it attempts to broaden the discourse and allows to extrapolate arguments to the wider context of post-socialist Eastern Europe and the Global East.

Read the full dissertation HERE03. Territorial
Resonate Beasts
Demystifying the Romanticization of the French-Canadian Identity
by Alison Bartlett

Resonate Beasts is a cross-examination into the production of nationalist identities entombed within architectural markings amongst urban landscapes. It seeks to problematize the historical and material symbolic orders embedded within the built environment that have constructed hegemonic cultural values produced via political agendas.

While this phenomenon can be witnessed on a global scale in real-time, this thesis focuses on Quebec’s French-Canadian Identity Crisis, a long established—yet ever pervasive—conflict since Britain’s conquering of France, succeeding power over the province of Quebec in 1759 and Canada (New France) the following year.

Through a multi-scalar survey, three case studies—the wayside cross, the seigneury grid and the French-Canadian farmhouse— challenge the esteemed creed mummified by French-Canadians: Pays-Paysages-Paysans (Countries-Landscapes-Peasants) in which the nationalist party uses as leverage in the construction of French-Canadian identity.
The intention of this thesis is to reveal how ones that threaten the nationalist movement’s propaganda and are therefore silenced in attempt to hermetically embalm a romanticized ideal. It understands that space is never neutral and thus it should not be the intent. Rather than relegating the past to the past, Resonate Beasts proposes gestures of re-articulation per case study: formal re-readings of architectural artefacts influenced by the critical art practices.

Read the full dissertation HERE
Territories of TravelPerforming the Cycladic Leisure-scape

by Christos Smyrniotis



The Aegean Archipelago, a dispersed landscape dependent on mobility and delimited by its islands’ isolated conditions, has been re-invented to perform and be performed as a leisure-scape. Constantly re-shaped by desire, the development of the Aegean islands unveils how touristification manifests as a territorial process enacted in both imaginary and material realms.

Territories of Travel examines the evolution of the Cyclades into a specialised constellation of travel sites. Operating to make the imaginary experienceable, mass tourism has reciprocally shaped the islands’ spaces, hosts and guests, forming the territory host. Focusing on spatial developments in the exemplary case of Mykonos island, the research dissects the tourist construction, uncovering its political and economic motives. An assemblage of institutional devices, immaterial lines, coastline conditions, attraction points, and programmed zones has framed insular landscapes and subjects as signs of a consumable experience. Mediatised and commodified tourism spaces have formed a network of technical sites like ports, ruins, beaches, hotels and infrastructures to accommodate the travel rituals. Enacted through a functional choreography of movement, consumption practices and touristic reproduction, the island has been abstracted, disciplined and detached in order to be extracted semantically, materially and economically.

Read the full dissertation HERE
Forest ChildrenHow Educations of Indigenous and Settler Children Reinscribe the Colonial Order

by Arielle Lavine



Land, its ownership and use are at the core of conflict between Indigenous nations and colonial powers. In Canada over the twentieth century, youth camps, appropriated in different forms as ‘transformative’ educational projects were a key method, used by Settlers to solidify colonial rights. White Settler children attended Summer Camps set typically on forested lakeshores to “play Indian” a they learned to canoe, swim, build fires and to camp away from settled urban environments. Indigenous children were torn from the families and communities who had inhabited those lands for millennia and relocated to brick-and-mortar Residential Schools designed explicitly to civilise them, Christianize them, and sever their relationships with their language, culture, and land. Taken together, the two programs form an exemplary case of two simultaneous, dependent processes of Settler Colonialism: Indigenous dispossession and Settler possession. The analysis of how children—both Settler and Indigenous—were indoctrinated into colonial ideas about land ownership, Indigeneity and nationhood is at the heart of my thesis. I focus on a landscape that I also learned to be my home, the Precambrian shield in Ontario, Canada—the unceded lands of the Anishinaabek.
The thesis frames the histories of two residential educational institution—the Indian Residential School and the Woodcraft Summer Camp—in parallel, proposing a method for studying these separate projects as an assemblage in order to deepen our understanding of education within a settler colonial context.1 These two programs have been rarely discussed together in the context of the impact of settler colonialism. In relation to the ongoing theorisation of the camp, this thesis highlights distinct architectural typologies of the organised youth camp. Through a critical reading into how both Settler and Indigenous education missions were conceptualised, how they were promoted, and how distinct learning environments were spatialised, the thesis reframes the institutions as complimentary colonial strategies for territorial control and cultural colonisation.

Read the full dissertation HERE

04. Infrastructural
Total Electric
The Spatial Possibilities in the Materialization of Energy
by Kayen Montes

The Total Electric Project investigates the moments of intersection between dwelling standardisation and electricity management in the household. Moreover, it analyses how, through its adoption as the ultimate energetic language, electricity created a symbiotic relationship with its users by domesticating them and their surroundings. The thesis is interested in the socio economical roots of this energy form and the psychological implications that its project has had on its subjects.

Accordingly, it investigates the subject matter from an architectural and social engineering perspective, as it perceives the spread of the electric network as the built manifestation of a perpetual process of social fragmentation produced as part of a modernisation project, since the dawn of industrial capitalism.

The project claims that the keys to alternative habitation modes, to that of the Western nuclear family, are hidden within a systemic transformation of the electric network. The central aim of the thesis is to interpret the effect these transformations could have on the built environment, and to move away from the palimpsest of social structures built upon the linear economic system that was the modern electric project. To achieve this, the research then focuses on the evolution of housing in London’s metropolitan context; by reviewing the regulatory process of space and electricity, it aims to uncover how this energy form was introduced and domesticated into our homes.

The Total Electric provokes the interpretation of architecture as the material organisation that regulates energy flows, currently bringing order through architectural and technological devices, but also inseparably, to see architecture as an energetic organisation
that upholds material forms. In the re-definition of this last relationship lies the underlying opportunity to transform the tripartite relation between users, energy, and architecture.
Read the full dissertation HERE












Alternative Breathers
On the Modes of Comfort
by Luyao Luo


The thesis ‘Alternative Breather’ focuses on the spatial connotation of comfort in relation to environmental control in the UK context and its social and economic origins and consequences.

It takes its cue from the changes in home heating systems and the spatial typological transformation of the British home in order to explore new modes of living in the UK today.

The research develops through a series of historical case studies that embrace different states of self-care associated with heating systems: From the prevailing norms of health and the environmental control objectives that shaped them since that late-eighteenth century, to glass houses and climate therapy; from registered chimneys that hierarchised spaces and central heating, to valves, control panels, auxiliary heating and air conditioning that shapes the space.

Through historical and typological analysis, cultural and architectural characteristics of domestic heating systems are unfolded in order to be instrumentalised towards alternative domestic living models within three housing types. When the individuality of the body is incorporated into the sociality of environmental control, the body is encouraged to find its exit by multiple ways.

Read the full dissertation HEREKristall
The Domestication of Water

by Daryan Knoblauch






Kristall is concerned with the spatial implications of water. It investigates the emergence of the bathroom as a built consequence of body culture through a series of case studies, revealing the spatial and social implications of the bathroom that have shaped the contemporary idea of domesticity.

The central aim of the thesis is to conceptualise the bathroom as a built device that encompasses the production of desire, body culture and functionality through a close reading of the fine arts, advertisements and the built environment.

Through historical and typological analysis, the bathroom’s cultural and architectural characteristics are uncovered so they may be instrumentalised as alternative domestic living models. Additionally, the thesis investigates the notion of the fetishisation of self-design, in which hygiene codes, cosmetics, fashion and body culture lead to domestic desires closely linked to the psychological rather than the physical. This phenomenon is further critically explored through the design.

Finally, Kristall aims to define an alternative model of domestic occupation that re-centres the body of the occupant within space not as a vector that undertakes the functions assigned to rooms but as a performative self that interacts with the other to find out how to feel alive today.

Read the full dissertation HERE

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