DS 2.6

We took the concept ‘homeless’ as our theme. We had no preconceptions about what it meant. It was expected the studio would develop an understanding of homeless across the year, as studio members set their minds to identifying, thinking and testing ideas about homeless. We appropriated a site at Broadgate for our projects, offering counter proposals that are critical of the developers’ commercial architecture. In semester one we designed a Sleep Structure to occupy just a part of the given site and in semester two we completed the total design with a Refectory and Garden. As Michel Foucault writes: the garden has been a sort of happy, universalising heterotopia since the beginning of antiquity…it is an astonishing creation that is now a thousand years old… The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space still more sacred than the others that was like an umbilicus, the navel