TESSER[ACT]  

Studio Patrik Schumacher

Tutor Jose Pareja Gomez

Team Dharmik Siddhapura, Kevin Paul Samuel, Namankumar Patel

Tesser[act] proposes a compact, high-density, three-dimensional urban fabric along the Thames between the City of London and Canary Wharf. Conceived as a metropolitan condenser, it aggregates housing, work, and civic programs within a single, publicly traversable building, adding large-scale capacity without expanding the urban footprint or fragmenting the street network. The project responds to London’s sustained population growth, immigration, and land scarcity by converting distance into proximity and reorganising everyday life around shared spaces and open outlooks. Methodologically, Tesser[act] is developed through an algorithmic framework that treats the voxel as the base tessellation and employs agent-based fields to distribute program, circulation, and structure as adaptive subsystems. Multi-scale rules—vertical and cardinal biases, program-to-program attraction/repulsion, and performance-driven void formation—translate behavioural logics into a legible, mixed-use landscape. The result is an integrated, generative, city-scale system designed to accommodate change over time, support shared infrastructure, and prototype a resilient model for high-concentration urban living in London.