PROJECT THESEUS

Studio Shajay Bhooshan

Tutors Ariadna Lopez, Andy Watts

Team Yaobin Wang, Bowen Miao, Ziyuan Huang, Yu Jiang

In the 21st century, Mega-cities are becoming more and more irresistible. The high degree of urbanisation in these cities, has brought incomparable convenience to its citizens. The high concentration of resources has generated opportunities for scientific research, employment, and participation in higher education. At the same time, however, this high degree of urban density has brought about several challenges: complex schemes of housing ownership, scarcity of constructable land, aging housing volume that is difficult to renew, and large-scale comprehensive projects that is difficult to be constructed.

Universities in these cities are also under pressure. Their built structures, programmes and departments become even more separated, diluting the sense of community existing in the traditional campus typology. The ageing structures cannot adapt to the contemporary demands of any campus expansion and addition of new functions, while the shortage of land makes the renewal of the universities situated in urban centres even more difficult.

Our group investigates a participatory campus design: Christopher Alexander's Oregon experiment. By providing a series of patterns including community texture, architectural form and construction method, students on campus can choose, design, and realise their design using participatory game engines. However, instead of the participatory strategy for Oregon, a medium-sized city in 20th c., we put forward a strategy for the Mega-city campus of the 21st c. The AA spirit has also attracted our attention. As the last independent architecture school in London, the AA has more than 200 exhibitions and 100 public art installations serving the communities around Bedford Square. Yet, the AA faces the problem of the urban campuses mentioned above. Our group explores these transformations and introduces a new design paradigm. Our proposed renewal project can bring more suitable functions to the modern campus, a direct community participation and more flexible space expansion for the AA school.

In Project Theseus, three main strategies are proposed: transformation, expansion, and connection. The initial users are students and staff of the school, as well as residents from the surrounding areas. Through the Project Theseus game system, the users can begin from the structural optimisation of their own space and actualise bottom-up space updates internally based on architectural modules. Using Project Theseus's game system and tree-structure modules, the building can grow from the inside to the outside, expanding and adding new functions. The goal of this system is to gradually transform and update the buildings that are located in the old urban area, connect them with the surrounding buildings, and generate a comprehensive scenario of urban university domain.