Diploma 10

Direct Urbanism: Scan and Insert

DIP-10

In reaction to master planned impositions, Diploma 10 has experimented with an alternative form of transformation: insertions as spatial interventions. To create these insertions, we scanned a polemic London territory that included the ideological vision of the Churchill Gardens Estate and the current commodity-led development in Nine Elms. Having revealed the variables that make up the space of the city, isolated the live realm and identified the interactions that exist between structures, situations and the forces of change, we tweaked these to generate, from the scale of the city to that of architecture, new transformative structures, situations and strategies.

In the Churchill Gardens Estate:

Hunter’s insertion of lightweight structures, enveloping a multilevel BID, creates a new form of integrated transformation; Steve opens up Churchill Gardens to the city’s users by inserting focal points for political, community and cultural groups; Sorina, questioning the ideal of the modernist estate, inserts city-like junctions to create alternative social interactions; Yonatan combines the mechanisms that control the individual, groups and communities to colonise the estate with a new type of school; and Feraghus starts to fragment the weaponised NHS by inserting a freestanding A&E into Churchill Gardens.

In Nine Elms:

Zeina counteracts the lack of spaces of engagement in the existing development by inserting a series of composite centralities; Frag challenges the master plan by combining similar development strategies into a new type of block-sized insertion that internalises the street; Pablo, by turning a Nine Elms tower on its side, creates a new barrier that juxtaposes territorial control with an increased social complexity; Ben inserts smart urban systems to create a spatial and digital interface in front of the US Embassy; and Camilla asks: ‘London as a social commodity is currently underrated: so why not insert a trajectory of different scaled encounters?’

Constructed Situation Workshop

Jan Willem Petersen

Technical Workshop

Alex Warnock-Smith

Tokyo Workshop

Professor Tom Heneghan
Tamao Hashimoto

Skidmore Owings & Merril Collaboration

Daniel Ringlestein
Alida Bata
Gareth Edwards

Martin Grinnell
Stuart Marsh
Dmitri Jajich
Bernhard Rettig

Unit Staff

Carlos Villanueva Brandt has been Diploma 10 Unit Master since 1986 and was awarded the RIBA President's Silver Medal Tutor Prize 2000. The varied work of Carlos Villanueva Brandt Architecture, formed in 1984, has been published widely and exhibited internationally.