Throughout my time at Loughborough I have holistically developed my skills, working hard to create schemes that can enhance communities and individuals through the power of caring architecture. I hope to continue with this approach throughout my career.
Below displays a collection of final drawings from my Graduation Project, entitled ‘It Takes a Village’. This scheme, located in Hackney on the site of the Marian Place Gas Holders, aims to create an inner city village for a variety of demographics, in order to create a community around families, and specifically children, currently living in poverty. It embraces the theme of the year ‘the care crisis’, in a considerate and holistic manner.
Ground floor plan displaying how the scheme is nestled within the site, with two linear functional blocks leading to the monument within the gas holder.
This project took inspiration from Hackney during the 1700 and 1800’s, a time in which it was a ‘pleasant and healthy village’. I explored this imagery through historical reading, collage making and sketching to develop an understanding of how this rural escapism benefitted the communities at the time. This contrasted to current social investigations, finding out that 43% of Hackney’s children currently live in poverty. These two factors drove the scheme forward, through combining the village typology into a concept that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’, in order to try and combat the high child poverty in the area. The gas holder on the site aims to draw this together, as an inspirational and monumental piece of existing architecture for local residents. The care crisis surrounding dementia was a key theme of the brief, which is manifested within this scheme through a dementia research institute combining with a children’s science centre that weaves in and out of the gas holder. The form of this structure was inspired by brain scans, with the central ‘village green’ mimicking the form the appears in the brain as a result of Alzheimers.
