@uow_ds2.6 Semester 2- Year 2 Our studio explores the void as an active architectural element. Working from a collective collage of incompatible fragments, we develop hybrid buildings where circulation becomes inhabitable, infrastructure becomes interior space, and contradictions generate new spatial possibilities. My project is set in the Surrey Quays car park, at the centre of the Canada Water regeneration led by British Land and Southwark Council. It takes the form of a cultural building specialised in photography, but conceived for three user groups: photographers, visitors, and staff. Rather than separating them, the design encourages interaction through layered circulation, multiple entrances, and spatial thresholds that allow their paths to cross naturally.
Circulation becomes inhabitable, infrastructure becomes interior space, and voids generate new spatial experiences. The building operates as a place of encounter — a space where different users move through the same architectural language while experiencing it in their own way.
The outcome is not a resolved object, but a hybrid spatial composition shaped by collage, iteration, and the productive tension between parts that were never meant to fit together.
Semester 1, Year 2
The Red Bridge
A project exploring the void through the historical and spatial context of Greenland Bridge in Canada Water. The original bridge operated through a pivoting mechanism that temporarily opened gaps within the landscape. These mechanical voids became the conceptual foundation for both the physical and digital modelling process.
In this project, the void is treated as an active architectural condition. Voids appear as deliberate empty spaces, as negative space between elements, and as opportunities for reprogramming. When architecture is “de‑voided” of its expected utility, it becomes open to interpretation — a space where new meanings and uses can form.
Canada Water, located in Rotherhithe in south‑east London, provided the wider context: a landscape shaped by water, infrastructure, and ongoing regeneration. The site model was divided into smaller fragments, each capable of being rotated, repositioned, or reoriented. This revealed how voids can exist at multiple scales and in multiple directions, shifting as the fragments move.
In the later stages of the design, a **red bridge** was introduced as a connective element. It links different spatial fragments, stitching together varied space qualities and establishing a subtle hierarchy between them. The bridge acts as both a pathway and a marker — a line of movement that unifies the composition while highlighting the voids that surround it.
The final outcome becomes a reinterpretation of Greenland Bridge: a field of rotated fragments held together by the invisible geometry of the pivot, activated by the red bridge, and unified through the voids that emerge between them. A landscape of openings, thresholds, and suspended relationships.
Semester 1, Year 1
a project built from memory. The brief asked us to translate a past moment into a spatial model, treating memory not as nostalgia but as architectural material. Each recollection became a fragment, a mood, a spatial condition that could be reinterpreted through form.
My first memory comes from winter days with my grandpa, sitting in the living room beside the garden while he told me traditional Japanese horror stories. The red carpet became the place where we drank tea, a warm threshold between the house and the cold outside. That atmosphere — the quiet tension, the soft light, the closeness to the garden — shaped the first part of the model.
The second memory is of my great‑grandmother’s room, a space that felt completely separate from the rest of the world. When I was with her, everything outside dissolved. I isolated this room as its own pavilion, a singular space of stillness, comfort, and suspension. A place where time slowed down.
The final model brings these two memories together not literally, but emotionally — a dialogue between warmth and quiet, between storytelling and stillness, between shared moments and intimate ones. It becomes an architecture of memory: fragmented, atmospheric, and held together by the feelings that shaped it.
Semester 1, Year 1 — Chair Transformation Project. A group project exploring how everyday objects can be reinterpreted through material transformation. Working in a team of three, we each collected a discarded chair from the streets of London. Using only the materials from these chairs and one additional element — rope — we were asked to create a new object with a completely different function.
From this constraint, we designed a high table intended for the British Library. The table becomes a small public device for sharing thoughts: a place where visitors can write reflections about a book they’ve read or leave recommendations for others. The act of writing becomes a quiet exchange between strangers, connected through the same surface.
The object also includes a second writing area at a lower level, designed specifically for children who would kneel down to use it. Both groups write on the same paper, but on opposite sides — adults on one side, children on the other. Over time, the sheets become layered with two perspectives: one side filled with adult reflections, the other with children’s thoughts, creating a shared archive of reading experiences.
By reassembling found materials into a new communal object, the project explores how reuse, constraint, and collaboration can generate unexpected forms of interaction within public space.
