Captured Landscape

This project questions the idea of extending and enclosing of an existing building to see this could redefine its identity and relationship between the landscape and the room. My design focuses on the interconnectivity between inside and out, and between spaces within the flats, carefully controlling materiality, orientation and light, in order to bring the garden suburb in. An initial detailed study of Shokin-Tei Tea Pavillion in Kyoto, Japan lead to a material exploration through a 1:10 interior model that tested the material and light qualities of the design, seeking to learn by recreating these. This inspirational project provided me with a series of techniques I could test in the contemporary London site. The site is located in the historic Garden City Suburb of Bedford Road in Chiswick, London. It is a post war housing block aimed at the elderly and surrounded in protected Queen Anne style architecture, sticking out like a sore thumb. The challenge was to soften the relationship to the context whilst extending and reimagining this building for a better quality of living and to increase it's carbon life-span. My design applies a new retrofitted structural grid enclosing the scheme and readdressing the existing building within the context. The grid also provides opportunities for translucency and the dissipation of heavy mass, creating a lighter visual proposal. It blends more into the garden suburb against the Queen Anne architecture of the context whilst remaining contemporary and expressive.