Taking place in the capital’s most exciting venue, the Truman Brewery, a vast reclaimed industrial site in Brick Lane, Tent London is the most comprehensive and diverse design event of the year, showing art and architecture, vintage and contemporary design by emerging and established designers from around the world.

Open Tables is a software application and a spatial environment, which researches and facilitates collaborative working between individuals and groups. The core purpose of Open Tables is to explore the potential for new kinds of collaborative working to emerge in spaces that combine analogue and digital modes of interaction: engaging both the mind and the senses in the navigation and production of information.

Come and see us at Tent London to talk to us about the project. We will be available at the stand throughout the exhibition.

Tent London opening times:
Thursday 18 September: 10.00 – 20.00hrs
Friday 19 September: 10.00 – 20.00hrs
Saturday 20 September: 10.00 – 20.00hrs
Sunday 21 September: 11.00 – 17.00hrs

For more information on Tent London, please visit their website @ www.tentlondon.co.uk
To find out more about our project, please visit project’s website @ www.opntables.com

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.

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.

WaG are currently seeking planning permission for this 3 bedroom house.
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Year:2006
Project description: New built house in Hackney, London
Estimated contract sum: £200,000

WAG personnel: Architects and urban planning

Project description: urban planning competition for Old Street

Estimated contract sum: £200,000

Award: awarded runner-up

Publications: partially published as Democratic Billboard in Architectural Design

This scheme came runner up in the second round of the Architecture Foundation organised, ‘Any Old St’ urban design competition. Our response to the brief embodied at an urban scale much of our thinking into ‘ecologies’ of material form, social space, living vegetation, signage and media technology.
The site was characterised by competing user groups. A few harmless and homeless ‘professional drinkers’ tended to spend all day occupying the few seats available. Local mothers with children would compete for the remainer, whilst the temporal rhythms of the site included periods with a strong movement through of local office workers and commuters. We felt an obligation to find a spatial solution that would be accessible to all of these social groups, whilst equally ensuring that none could dominate or devalue it for others.
The basis of our proposal were alterations to the ground plane of the pavement, to create what we call archetypal conditions. These included an ampitheatre and terracing, which shielded pedestrians from road noise, and organised seating in part towards the gigantic graphic surfaces of the current advertising hoardings on Old St roundabout. We proposed that this advertising hoarding, together with others on the site, be taken under local control, and used for local art, information and entertainment (such as showing World Cup football etc), perhaps part financed through advertising. This idea, which we call the Democratic Billboard Manifesto, has conceptually driven parts of much of our urban thinking.
The ground plane was further subdivided by a ’social landscape’ – a patterned field of plinths that could be sat on, and used to define territories. By positioning a pram and a shopping bag, it is possible to create a temporary playground enclosure. By occupying some seats off of the main pathways, it is possible to spend all day with a can of Special Brew, and not alarm anyone, nor be excluded from this public place.
Buried between paving slabs accross the entire space, we proposed to have sensor driven and choreographed fountain nossels. These would provide cooling and spectacle in the summer, and would wash down the entire place regularly – removing spilt beer and worse.
Within the trees we proposed to suspend lighting and media rigs, as previously discussed, and also ‘tree sculptures’, cones of branches and foilage which would be cut out from the heavy summertime tree cover – rather like an arboreal Gordon Matta-Clark piece. These cones would allow shafts of light to penetrate what is currently an overshaded place.

Much of our work with students has developed from thinking about this, particularly the design studio led by Cordula Weisser at the University of Greenwich