Jury’s report:
The project explored social structures and an approach to tenure rather than architecture or built form. Housing is grouped in small courts with shared community gardens and clustered communal resources. The jury welcomed this holistic consideration and positive vision for medium density housing in the 21st century.

The Milton Keynes Social Ecology by WAG is an urban cohousing permaculture project, aimed at meeting a growing niche demand in the housing market. The proposal is an opt-in community for individuals and families who want to take the next step in sustainable modern living. The Social Ecology is organised through the collective ownership and management of a community freehold, with private leaseholds for dwellings. There are shared car pools, rather than private car ownership, and instead of roads, a network of cycle routes and footpaths cross the site. There is an ecology of green spaces – from public to private. The dwellings are clustered into groups of twenty units, organised around a linear public park, permaculture based community school, market hall and democratic billboard mediaspace. Each co-housing cluster overlooks shared garden, organic food growing and playground spaces. The individual dwelling units are organised around private courtyard gardens, which are treated as an external living rooms.

Click images to enlarge

About Europan:
Europan is a biennial competition for young architects and urban design professionals, under 40 years of age, to design innovative housing schemes for sites across Europe.

About Sailmaker’s Building:
“the listed building at 11 West India Dock Road only retains its original front and east wall. A rare former sail makers warehouse which was subsequently used for making specialised equipment for steamship merits serious consideration for statutory protection.” GLIAS: GREATER LONDON INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY SOCIETY Notes and news — August 2000 “Threatened historic buildings in Limehouse Conservation Area” Tom Ridge

For more images see http://www.wag-architecture.co.uk/?p=365

Location: Sheffield
Year: 2007
WAG: Architects
Project description: Competition Entry

A predominantly timber extension, this proposal weaves new media technology into a patterned wood panel facade – creating a distinctive new aesthetic combining luxury and function, appropriate to this Festival Centre brief. The roof gardens, themselves both pleasurable and functional (recycling greywater), when seen from the station and square spouting above the wooden weaves, suggest a basket of flowers – a gift to all who arrive in the city.

Our primary spatial move was to separate the volume of the new auditorium from the existing building creating an intense space between the two buildings, which we call the Show-Station. At ground level this space provides a public route through the centre, off of which are located a cafe terrace the box office and mediatheque. We have cut into the existing Showroom structure, creating stepped back terraces, which host a small ‘forest’, and allow light into the space, bouncing off strategically placed reflective surfaces. Above two bridges connect the new terraces in the old structure to the new building. One of these bridges is the main public access to the cinema. The other connects the new Workstation studios set into the roof gardens of the two buildings. We imagine the Show-Station space to be alive with media, used and curated by the Showroom and Workstation practices to showcase their work.

The woven timber facade wraps around the building. Along the long facade this breaks down into adjustable sun screens, shading the S-SE facing workstation windows in the existing building, which must suffer from over heating. Incorporated into this are visual media screens, used for advertising (both for Workstation based companies, and external revenue generators) and communications.

We propose to re-landscape the grass square in front of the building. The landscaping creates mounds to sit on, and a large screen at the end, which reflects sun back into the square, and can be used for public festival projections from the cinema.

SUSTAINABLE STRATEGIES
Our sustainable strategy has 6 main components:

SUN
Dealing with the sun on this site presents some challenges, and has structured much of the design. The site, and the public square in front, are potentially in the shade cast by the building for a lot of the time. Our proposal pulls away from the existing building, and bounces sunlight back down into the foyer. Furthermore, the screen at the opposite end of the square similarly bounces sunlight back into the square.
The new facade plays with the sun in a number of ways. We have placed adjustable sun screens (and media screens) across the south facing windows, allowing them to be shaded in the summer.
Meanwhile, the pattern of the facade generally would be fine tuned to work plastically with the sun. Each protruding facet contains a small PV cell sufficient to charge a bettery to power an LED light. At night this field of LEDs illuminates up out of the woven facade, as if light through the planet by the sun.

WIND FARM
A vertical helix wind farm installation on roof of existing building – harvesting updrafts created by building, and at higher level the wind passing along the valley. The helices are painted to produce animated op art effects.
GROUND SOURCE GEO-THERMAL HEATING
Below the ground in the re-landscaped square a ground source heat pump system is installed, to supply the Showroom and Workstation

UNDERGROUND AIR COOLING
Cooling for the foyer and office spaces is augmented by air passing through concrete tubes under the Show-Station space
WATER
Rainwater is harvested from the roofs, whilst greywater is sequentially cleaned by plants on the roof, before being recycled within the building.

BIO-DIVERSITY
The gardens on the roof of the buildings will work together with lawns in the square to add a significant new base for wildlife in the heart of the city.

We were charged with thinking about power needs in two distinct scenarios: the expansion of the leisure spaces and activities of the home into the garden, and the bulk delivery of power to buildings, developments and events which are ‘autonomous’, or not connected to the electric and gas networks.

It was my role to constantly remind them of their companies stated goal, which is to lead the world in the transition to an economy which is beyond petroleum..

I did not get to see much of Lisbon, but there is a great suspension bridge there…

CONCEPT

With five directions of entry, this bridge will get very busy at several times during the day – for example during the school and work time rush hours. We felt that the bridge should feel big enough to cope with its important role as a local network hub – that it should provide an excess of access. It is important that the bridge is fully accessible – not simply in terms of wheelchairs, but also socially and psychologically. It should not be possible for any group of youths to dominate this space, whether intentionally or not. Our proposal is a broad, gently curving landscape platform, springing gently from the pavement level along Redhill St. We would ideally like to perforate the old wall in several places to give access to the broad platform. We would be able to reuse the old stone pieces as ‘ruins’ within the landscaping of the ‘platform’. However, if this proved unacceptable, then the scheme would work with a single point of access from Redhill St.

The large platform is perforated in several places – alternatively, it can be read as a dense network of pathways melded together. The voids between the pathways allow views and shafts of light down to the canal water. Typically, we have benches wrapping protectively around the voids, creating some real social places – allowing groups and individuals to hang out here – whether groups of teenagers or mothers and toddlers – without dominating and controlling the space.As well as providing a uniquely social bridge to occupy above the canal, the view of the bridge from the towpath will be extraordinary – as our model images are starting to suggest.

The dramatic geometry of the timber gridshell structure on the underside of the bridge, will be animated by the reflections of light that come down through the voids and perforations in the platform decking above.The bridge will contain planting, both landscaped into the surface, and incorporated into the voids and benches. We have also tried to evolve a form which allows some dedicated routes for cyclists.

STRUCTURE

This presentation from a team of architects, engineers and landscape designers shows a snapshot of work in development. Initial social design ideas have been developed and tested, and have produced a series of structural and tectonic studies. Initial ideas about casting a combined timber and concrete shell structure (1) were by studies of spider web like tension structures (2) before moving towards the currently favoured prefabricated timber grid-shell structure (3).

We have been working on a number of architecture projects in and around East London’s up and coming Homerton area. These include a new build eco house on Fenn St, which will be going on site later this year, an eco bar in Bohemia Place, currently in planning, and the remodelling of a house on Kenworthy Road. One other project, which has thrown up lots of interesting local London history, is a feasibility study for a housing developer, for the former Convent of the Sacred Heart, on the corner of Kenworthy Road and Hassett Road.

This triangular site contains two main building blocks, with gardens and a courtyard. The square shaped building near the centre of the site, which is Grade II listed, was built around 1800 by Leny Smith, a local silk manufacturer, as Sidney House and Estate. The house was bought by the Catholic Church at the end of the nineteenth century, to be used as a convent. The original house was extended with a new wing to the north west, and a new block was added to the east at this time. The complex has remained intact and in excellent condition since then, with the exception of a lift block added to the south façade of the original building during the nineteen eighties. Particularly notable, are the main staircase, and some hallway plaster moldings.

The main entrance to the original Sidney House was from the north, accessed by a driveway from Sidney Road, as Kenworthy Road was called until 1939. Sidney Road was itself previously the northern section of Wick Lane, an ancient Hackney route leading from the mills of the Knights Templar’s estate to the north east (on the site still known as Temple Mills), down south along Kenworthy Road, crossing the Hackney Brook (which presumably now runs culverted below Wick Road), across what is now the eastern edge of Victoria Park, before finishing along the only stretch of road that is still called Wick Lane, in Old Ford.
The gardens of the Sidney House extended west of Sidney Road for almost a mile, and were one of many luxury estates that existed in Homerton from the Tudor period, formed out of the extensive lands of the Knights Templar in this area. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the village was the home of Homerton College, which still exists within the University of Cambridge, if not any longer in Homerton itself. Eton College too, had a presence here. The construction of the North London railway in the middle of the nineteenth century, with the now long demolished Victoria Park station near the southern end of Kenworthy Road, turned the area into something of a leisure destination among the north London middle classes for a while. However, the spread of Victorian developer housing, and the construction of two workhouses, which would later became Homerton and Hackney hospitals during the various fevers that hit London in the mid nineteenth century, meant that the middle and upper classes largely left the area. However, in recent years the gentrification of the areas around Victoria Park, have lead huge increase in local property values, and the Olympic Village site, less than half a mile to the east, promises a major revival in the areas fortunes.

In our approach to developing the site , we sought to reestablish the importance of Sidney House within the site, by clearing away minor ancillary Victorian buildings in front of the old house. We proposed that the eastern Victorian block be developed as 4-6 affordable housing flats, whilst the Sidney House building, together with its west wing extension, contained 11 luxury flats. These have been organised so that the most important architectural spaces and moldings stay coherent and intact. All flats would have a garden or balcony space, and the roofs had courtyard gardens incorporated into them. It is possible to have a site wide environmental strategy. Solar Heating panels could be sited at roof level, as might a wind turbine. There is space at ground level to store the plant required for energy distribution, rainwater harvesting and greywater recycling.

WAG: project instigators and architects

Project description: When the railway embankment running north from Liverpool St Station, parallel to Mare Street, was constructed in the nineteenth century, the century long relationship between John Soane’s exquisite St John’s church (built in ) and Bethnal Green High Road was broken. The utilitarian steel bridge that now crosses Bethnal Green High Road 5m above the pavement level, all but blocks views of the church from the high road, and completely destroys the place that must have existed between the calm white stone of Soane’s modest masterpiece and the chaos of Bethnal Green market streching out in front of it.

WAG have developed a series of optical and digital installation proposals for the railway bridge that will allow a sense of the space of the place that might have existed there during the 18th and 19th centuries to be discerned. WAG’s first ideas examined the possible construction of a huge periscope which would sit like a lid over the bridge, bouncing reflections of the hidden view of the church over the bridge. Other kaliedoscopic variations of this machine attenuated the verfremdung – or alienation – of the originary scene.
However, whilst these analogue proposals had an elegant visibility to their mechanism, this same visibility would literally sometimes block other parts of the church view not currently obscured! WAG therefor settled upon a more sublime digital option. A bank of video cameras fixed to one side of the bridge record hidden views of the church, which are played back in real time on a continuous digital screen which lines the other side of the bridge. As this screen is digital, it is of course possible to discuss what other content it might carry. This might include local community content, commissioned video art, and advertising (which might pay for the project.
The intention of the project is not to simply make the bridge (modernity) invisible, but rather involves something like a dialectical aufhebung – or sublimation – of the lost view of the church building. The project hopes to encourage thinking about the role and ownership of images and views within the public realm, and to provoke questions about the experience of historical space.

WAG have started discussing the idea with Spacia and Railtrack, who own the property.

This piece of work is part of the Democratic Billboard, an ongoing WAG research and development project. This series of urban, architectural and art ideas explores the possible future development of the emerging media, advertising and communications infrastructures within the public spaces of the metropolis.

1. Take into ‘partial public ownership’ the advertising and media infrastructures which inceasingly fill our cities.
2. Redistribute the use of, and access to, this infrastructure. For example:

20% ART
20% LOCAL COMMUNITY USE
20% LOCAL BUSINESS USE
20% NEWS
20% ADVERTISING

The Democratic Billboard is a conceptual urban research tool. We have used it to think about the kinds of socio-spatial demands that architects can articulate through design proposals.
The Democratic Billboard research project has manifested itself in different forms for different schemes. However, all of these proposals are driven by the core manifesto, and articulate a shared demand upon the emerging televisual, security and communications networks and infrastructures that are growing within our cities. The growth of these netwoks is comparable to the development of historic modern urban infrastructures, such as water, electricity, transportation. All have oscillated between various forms of public and private control. Just as these were all sites of political and social struggle over their ownership, management and use, so too is a similar struggle currently being fought over new urban communications infrastructure.
There is a contradiction in that most of the technologies are privately owned and managed, although many of the physical spaces that they occupy, manage and move through, are publicly owned.