Interiors Year 3 Studio 01

Studio brief

The studio will consider two main strands of research this year.

• 24 hour London - from day to night; from night to-day; in work rest and play
• How to combat the ‘Sensory Deprivation of the Covid City’

Now is the time to reset and rethink, nothing is quite the same as it used to be. What better time to look to the future, challenge the present and how to do things differently? It is on this premise that the Studio will seek to create bridges between the daytime and night-time economy. We will conceive propositions that transform, reveal and invigorate the day-scape and nightscape of the city on a 24-hour cycle, offering a playground to explore the urban and interior context of the city, the proximity of inside and outside, public and private and the thresholds between them. Investigating and developing narratives that enhance sensory experience, connect on a human scale and capture the essence of existing urban fabric.

The studio’s main occupation is with investigating the performative nature of interior design; the temporary and transformative through spatial intervention into an underutilised, closed building that will reveal itself to the street and become permeable, thus engaging the local community and creating a ‘theatre of the every day and night’. We will focus on scenography; the street and site as a stage set, occupying passageways and an interior court – curating new narratives, choreographing, activating and developing proposals to form ‘playgrounds’; transitory, flexible work/rest/play spaces that enhance our sensory experience and connections. The site will be 106 Commercial Street in Spitalfields, the remarkable historic former Stapleton’s Horse and Carriage Repository.

Connect + Reveal

You will curate a new narrative and identity, designing transformable interventions to open up the closed frontage and ‘connect + reveal’ the interior. [Ad]dress the City streetscape and reveal the interior by intervening into the disused passageway/s.  The research will organise itself into three interconnecting strands: video/visual, touch/sensory and body/measurement. The intervention can be an interactive spatial form; street theatre, active frontages and interior structures/ devices that are adaptable and flexible. Determine a way that the space can adapt and transform to a 24 hour daytime and night-time cycle where the occupation and demographic will change over this period responding to time and need, and how it may connect participants through a shared sensory experience.

Let there be light

You are to determine a spatial programme for the interior court that ‘lights up the space’ with activity and occupation on a 24 hour cycle. The main interior proposal will connect either physically and or narratively to the interventions that inhabit the passageways/ street creating a bridge between the exterior and the building’s interior.