Generic Architecture: The Ground of Vertical Living.
This year we will continue our focus on housing and the role of arrival sequences. In the passage from the city to the home we undergo a shift from a member of the public to a private domestic condition. The importance of this trajectory is the relationship between the identity of places (public, streets, lobbies, stairs, corridors, doorways) and the way in which we constantly adopt and alter our individual identities. For studio BA 12 this is a fundamental condition of architecture. We are going to explore the arrival sequence in its most difficult and problematic context: the tower block. Living vertically brings certain advantages but the way in which we gain access to ‘dwellings in the sky’ is often alienating if not simply anonymous. We will be working on an existing tower block estate in Brighton and increasing its density by both transforming it and adding housing in, around and on top of it. The work will support and be supported by live research which has recently led to a publication of the conceptual framework for arrival sequences in housing as well as a second publication on the work of the studio.