HEATHROW COMMUNITEA

Heathrow CommuniTEA is a community-led and sustainable tea farm hamlet aiming to provide alternatives to the ever-changing tea-drinking lifestyle and tea culture in modern life. Tea is more than a drink, but a lifestyle and an indispensable item in British culture and society. Considering the changing tea-drinking habits under the covid-19 pandemic influence, the doubled tea consumption during the lockdown, and the heavy reliance on imported tea products from overseas agricultural production - the project aims to become the prototype tea plantation village that promotes a sustainable and resilient tea production system, intensifies interactivity between communities and develop an interactive tea-drinking lifestyle. Heathrow CommuniTEA will be a vital place to explore the future relationship between tea drinking culture, human and ecology by investigating how the architecture, the spatial and social connection in the project could potentially reposition the value of tea, tea drinking lifestyle and consumer culture. With village housings sit between the productive and natural landscape, tea houses and communal facilities for promoting tea farmers and local communities interaction, and factories of homegrown organic tea and tea-based biodegradable materials production - the project proposes ecological sensibility and sustainable concept through the new ecological-minded village and lifestyle in the architecture.