DS 15

The studio uses theoretically-informed, fine art tactics, including chance operations, the study of grids, the generation of lines, and large-scale painting and composition to generate ideas about aesthetics and the mediated nature of experience. These are applied to the analysis of urban sites. We frame our study of the contemporary city’s problems in the light of a critical awareness of the precise characteristics and hidden ideologies of the architectural representations that constitute our tools. The students generate techniques collaboratively, sometimes working in pairs, sometimes in groups, sometimes by swapping pieces of work. They developed urban visions for Catford in South London which sought to address the challenging problems of climate change, transport, social cohesion, housing, public and private space and the generation of uses appropriate to the needs of the working class community. Individual projects, arising out of collective urban visions, drew on the area’s past and present relationships with the performing arts, the presence of pentecostal churches, the need for new housing, the retrofitting, rather than demolition, of existing Modernist housing estates, the need for new nodes of public transport, the lack of provision of social programmes suited to the local community and the current, destructive dominance of the South Circular Road that carves its way through the town centre.

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