Critically designing and intervening within the material and immaterial domains of waste. As part of an aware design approach Lewis unpacks the manifold of determinations from which our society determines value.
Bartering with Bucharest
The Flow Brokerage
Bucharest has an abundantly contentious relationship with signage and this is manifested architecturally, strewn across or precisely sewn into the urban fabric without consideration of the lived experience behind the promotions. This experience leaks into the local culture of the old town streets, gradual and considered in morphology, are cluttered with open invitations to express and cheap adoptions of foreign cultures. This displaces local cultural practices for tourist oriented desires and dilutes the surviving establishments as they peer out from behind the street signs and far stretching banners.
This architectural proposition can transform Dambovita into a socially equitable part of the city once again, where the focus is on collective ownership and responsible partnership development. Creating a social landscape ripe for architectural intervention. By designing for transparency, shared infrastructure, and regenerative practices, Bucharest can bridge social divides, fostering collaboration between government, empowered businesses, and active citizens.
The fictitious relationship with advertisement transgresses from the scale of the city down to the building. Advertisement sterilizes the ability for the building to co-determine a spatial relationship with people and place, the idealised and fixed states capitalised imagery subverts meaningful dialogue with the built form.
Facade Extraction – Misaligned moments
Pairing a ‘seat and slide’ nested within the facade of the bartering hall accommodates for happenstance eventualities. Here the little boy runs circles around his mother as they wait for their appoint at the flow brokerage.
Masterplan | 1:1250 | Bartering Tactics
A Masterplan of civic scale negotiations demonstrates the stitching of the interventions into the existing domains of ownership in the city of Bucharest.
Translating the serendipitous pathways that bridge across the site was a key opportunity to redefine a neglected back of house ecology. Iterative and responsive design propositions were explored to best cultivate the sense of place associated with exchange.
A Co-determined design approach
Engaging with the misaligned as an interstitial space between the advertisement and that of the build presents an opportunity to be ‘Co-determined’, David Leatherbarrow’s notion of orientation in Architecture-Oriented-Otherwise, by using reciprocity as a vehicle for gaining participation with buildings as a communicative space where the conditions between building, people and place becomes a shared condition that ‘gives into what it lacks’. Giving into the physical constraints of the built form to accommodate for experience.
Agile model making
Modelling the context surrounding the micro site, giving existing buildings a mobile aspect accommodates for the iterative design intentions. Bartering Halls
Extending into the civic fabric to inculcate a co-determination of experience between the building and the people that engage with it. Modelling the interstitial
Interlacing the programmatic and navigable components of the buildings within the envelope of the building unites the programmatic aspects with the co-determined relationship between the building and the city.
Constant Questionning
Continually prompting Urban, Architectural and Technical questions throughout the project constantly engaged our speculative thinking around sensitive design propositions. Dexterous detailing
Critically operationalising the geometry of the structural elements, like the tubular steel superstructure in the misaligned facade, allow for subtle manipulation of the junctions, making the construction on site more adaptive to unintentional misalignments. The circular nature of the tubular steel accommodates for knuckle joints fixed onto these elements to rotate around its center point, enhancing the installation of the planes.
Mobile Systems Programming
Planning the interfaces of the flow brokerage in context and amongst the flows, material and immaterial, that navigate between the building allows for an appropriate nesting of programmatic adjacencies with stakeholder use cases. Digital and Physical Reciprocity
Making has become an integral design avenue for the project, establishing tools for translating between mediums proved invaluable. Photogrammetry is a tool that transgresses between the physical and digital production and operationalising of artifacts in the design process.
This example looks to unpack the manifold of determinations in the physical model as a way of thinking through the programmatic overlaps.
Reinterpreting precedent studies through made artifacts
Contentious relationship with advertisement.
Collaging the challenges presented to Bucharest’s citizens by situating them in their residential domain, on the balconies.
Approach view
Exploring structural methodologies through modelling.
A film captured to unpack the sense of place for the visitor and for the local
Site Plan
Site Photography – ‘Making do and getting by’
In reference to the photographic explorations of Richard Wentworth
Misaligned manifestations | Constant negotiations in the city
