Context City

This year, our design investigations and projects will focus on deprived neighbourhoods around the City of London. We will explore strategic and architectural potentials within an ongoing process of urban transformations.

The guiding theme of this year is Context City. This refers to both, the location next to the City of London and architectural interventions that critically engage in social and spatial urban contexts. We will explore ways in which sharing and living together can be part of a unique and synergetic urban life.

For further studies and inspirations, we will visit the city of Berlin in Germany, in the beginning of November.

Induction Exercises

To prepare the Unit work, we will make the City Context book. It will have two parts, geographic information as well as explorations of urban design techniques from our research area. We will research spatial properties and qualities, by developing distinct methodologies and means of representation. The book will allow us to understand our working environment and the structure of the city.

Main Project

The City of London is located on the North bank of the river Thames. It is based on the old Roman settlement Londinium. The slightly raised embankment allowed structures right next to the river without fear of flooding.

While London’s size and population grew further and further, the Roman grid formations turned into a maze in medieval times. Since then, the City of London slowly became the ‘office’ of London and uses turned increasingly into finance, insurance and trade. Political and religious institutions as well as culture moved further west, while industry and harbour facilities developed further east along the Thames embankments. This urban division of functions became manifest during the 19th century, when the City of London, or so called ‘Square Mile’ or just the ‘City’, solely connected to the money economy.

In the shadow of this extreme concentration of wealth, the immediate urban context of the City of London developed a dependency on the financial district and residential communities around it. It became predominantly an area of services, manufacturing, infrastructure and cheap labour that would maintain the day to day needs of the City. As the City changed, so did its context. The fringe area has responded to changing demands of the City and has remained in a constant state of adjustments and transformations. This had fundamental effects on the physical and social urban fabric.


Research Area, drawing by Tom Green
Nowadays, the immediate context of the City of London is one of the most diverse but also fragmented areas in London. It bears traces of different ways of living and working, that reach back many centuries. Georgian housing, 19th Century brick warehouses, Post War and contemporary housing, transportation infrastructure as well as empty land are side by side. It is an area of contrasting and heterogenious dimensions of old and new, big and small, solid and void, dark and light, slow and fast, shiny and mat; home to people from all over the world, rich and poor.

Over the last few decades, the City of London has gained an expanded position within global financial markets. Its hunger for land and resources as well as a shift in London’s gravity eastwards, has partly led to a restructuring of the City fringe, with warehouses being converted, shops and restaurants opened and new jobs in service industries created.

Nevertheless, large parts of the City’s fragmented and fragile context remains difficult to use for local and adjacent communities. Unit 2 will focus on these critical areas to the north and south of the river Thames.


Design Process

In the beginning of the academic year, we will explore contexts around the City of London. Investigations will address historic layers and existing conditions, such as physical form, local communities, urban life, atmosphere and finer qualities of place. Furthermore, each student will explore potential needs and opportunities, to open room for imagination. Speculations about future scenarios and design strategies will guide a focused analysis.

To support this process, the Unit will visit Berlin in November. We will study fragmented urban neighbourhoods in the inner part of Berlin and distinct architectural case studies that are part of this unique urban condition.

Back in London, each student will chose one of the possible sites for their main building design project. We will explore ways in which strategies, design programmes and architecture can be an invigorating part of urban life and relate to the particularities of the research area. We aim at understanding each intervention to be an anchoring piece within the fragility of the city and its communities.

Furthermore, cities are shared environments and as part of the theme Context City, we will ask how contexts, life and architecture can resonate deep into one another in a synergetic manner. This will set the tone for interventions in a range of interrelated scales, from urban through to building and details scales.

The individual projects will focus on designing site specific buildings. Each student will carefully develop architectural qualities, sense of place, logic of space, proportion, resourcefulness and programmatic precision as well as technical and material finesse. By invigorating existing and imagining new, we intend to create schemes that are both, sustainable and enjoyable.

Kristina Fescenko

City of London - Grid Transformations

Roman London was based on a grid formation. It structured the city in clear sections and urban blocks. Over the centuries, this grid formation was transformed into an irregular street pattern. Shortcuts, wider streets and squares, courtyards that were made publicly accessible or other more immediate spatial necessities changed the orthogonal grid into a finer grained medieval maze that still exists in many parts today.

Such transformations are not untypical for former Roman cities and can also be observed in Istanbul, where Islamic planning allowed a change of urban layout.





Centre for Ethical Fashion

The design project embraces a series of new public spaces and a Centre for Ethical Fashion, located on a site of the former Truman Brewery, an arts and media quarter, along Brick Lane in East London.

The proposal expands on a number of distinct pre-conditions. First of all, the Brick Lane area has been and still is connected to the fashion industry. 19th century silk weavers have created a unique style of Georgian housing with light weaving rooftop studios. Furthermore, Fashion Street still hosts fashion events and numerous in- and export companies trade fashion around Brick Lane. Secondly, the area east of Brick Lane belongs to one of the most deprived and fragmented urban areas in the UK. The local Bangladeshi community relates to both conditions of fashion and urban deprivation, locally and abroad.





The immediate existing site has listed industrial brewery buildings and a large disused car park to the east of Brick Lane. The site offers the opportunity to mediate between the life of Brick Lane and its more lifeless hinterlands to the east.




The idea for a Centre for Ethical Fashion grew out of a careful analysis of existing spatial and social conditions, as well as a general need for more ethically produced fashion, locally and globally. While for example organic and fair trade food is commonly accepted, the importance of ethical fashion has yet to find its place in retailers’ and consumers’ minds. As such, the Centre for Ethical Fashion is set up to research and enhance the entire processes of design, textile production and clothing manufacturing, labour conditions, marketing, transportation and retail. It is a place of developing simultaneously important knowledge and skills in this young, but also growing market.





The Centre for Ethical Fashion extends an existing network of alleys and open yards of the former Truman Brewery from west to east. A cluster of existing and four new buildings form an intricate sequence of public spaces. A proposed addition of a temporary fashion runway and exhibition space is set within the existing Atlantis building. The new buildings are grouped around a new square and accommodate the main workshop building, a library, hotel, restaurants and a market. The market offers a range of smaller shop units and allows people to buy and discover ethical garments as well as to understand their value.




The main workshop building has a central access corridor and exhibition hall, as well as a series of courtyards and functional building sections. Together they form a continuous yet also diverse network of spaces that facilitates fashion research and production processes from weaving to retail. The central corridor connects and discloses each building section along subtle qualities of proximity and distance, light and dark, as well as open and close. This way, the building sections are allowed to relate to each other internally but also to adjacent public space in an invigorating manner.














Each building section allows autonomous flexible configurations, according to changing needs of fashion making. They have double height spaces and temporary one storey timber modules or ’tables’ that allow reconfigurations within them.

The roof of the main building is a thin concrete frame structure. It sets a linear pattern throughout the building and forms a kind of canopy for the delicate activities below. Deep roof beams allow to achieve diffused light and provide an even light condition for workspaces and to protect fabrics from direct sunlight. Furthermore, the visual and functional transparency below the unifying roof permits a sense of depth of space and connection. The Centre is collaborative environment that allows inspiration and progress as Ethical Fashion evolves.







For further information, please go to Downloads

Leoni Brooks

The design is located on the site of the former Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, East London. Local creative industries are increasingly marginalised, due to market pressures. The proposal expands on already existing art studios and gallery spaces within the old industrial brewery buildings. The main intervention is an arts and crafts school, culture centre and accommodation.

On an urban scale, the project creates a sequence of new public spaces that allows urban life to the east of Brick Lane.



The main building is a mat-building, allowing re-configuarable spaces for different users of the art school and culture centre, including library, cafe and public workshops.

The ground floor utilises courtyard light for public spaces and private workshops. Whereas the first floor utilises indirect light from rooflights above for artist studios and workshops. The third floor contains residential units for students and artists. Interaction and collaboration is encouraged with wide coridors always directed towards courtyard light and adjacent social spaces.







On the details scale, cross laminated timber panels will be the main structural element with a brick exterior leaf to compliment surrounding context. The developed building typology has individual structural units, each self supporting. The angle of the roof pitch and light wells allows indirect and diffused sunlight into the artists studios, the courtyards light up the ground floor workshops.




Kingsley Koranteng

School of Applied Fabrics

The site is located on the border of the City of London, between office buildings and the Petticoat Lane Market. International and local companies as well as independent seller offer a wide variety of clothing and fabrics.

The project is an extension of market functions, school for various fabric orientated industries, as well as new public spaces. The proposal is hereby centered on the conversion and extension of an mid 20th century warehouse. Workshops, research spaces, teaching, learning and making are housed withing five vertical buildings that are inserted into the preexisting generic warehouse.

The outer facade skin is made of vertical awnings that allow privacy and solar shade if required. It is a play of soft and hard as well as dark and light.








Ana Teixeira

Cinema and Film School

The project is located in Shoreditch, East London. It is a Cinema and Film School that is situated around an elevated Overground line. Social spaces intertwine from public to more private parts of the intervention. The main building has several film theatres that interlock around the train tracks and a central lightwell.




Cinema and Film School Library by Ana Teixeira

Khalid Egal

Georgian Squares

East London had a rich diversity of Georgian Squares. After they were fully opened to the public, the squares allowed neighbourhoods access to green spaces, a sense of gravity and civic use. Over the 20th century, some of the former squares were integrated into semi-private housing estates or used for construction sites.
The study retraced the strategic positioning of squares within the old city fabric and their decline.



Plaster and wax model of Georgian Squares during the 19th century, Whitechapel


Civic Bath

The proposal is located on a disused former Georgian square. All old Georgian houses around the square were demolished during the 1950s and replaced with housing estates. One side of the square was left open and is currently a disused car park.

The main building design is a Civic Bath and is located on the square, occupying the space of the car park. Above ground, the main building intervention frames the square from the east. It contains a community cafe, health and sport facilities as well as the main bath entrace.




Civic Bath initial sketches by Khalid Egal


Below ground, the building is formed around existing cherry trees with finger like extensions. Each of the extension contains different bathing conditions, from hot to cold. The pools have different tiles to allow a landscape of colour and light. The circulation is a subtle play on different genders as well as needs of young and old.











Tom Green Exhibition

The Unit 2 student Tom Green exhibited his Diploma 5th Year work at Feilden Glegg Bradley Studios in Soho, in November 2014. The exhibition was organised by the Architecture Foundation and was titled ‘Futures in the Making’.

"Drawing on Inspiration

A University of East London student has had his work selected for a prestigious London exhibition that showcases the best postgraduate work in the capital.

Tom Green, who is studying at UEL’s School of Architecture, Computing & Engineering (ACE), was invited to display his project on redesigning London’s Bishopsgate Goods Yard.

The exhibition, organised by the Architecture Foundation, is entitled ‘Futures in the Making’ and displays the best drawings, models and research from the final projects of postgraduate students from across London’s architecture schools.

“I am privileged that the Architecture Foundation think my work is good and has been selected from hundreds of students for this exhibition,” said Tom.

“It’s a great honour to represent UEL in this fashion, as well as the fact that my work been seen and talked about by peers within the architecture profession.”

The Bishopsgate Goods Yard was used as a transport hub from the 1840s until it was destroyed by fire in 1964. Tom’s proposal of an urban scheme combining the old with the new draws on the site’s history.

The Dean of the School of ACE, Professor Hassan Abdalla, said he was delighted that an ACE student had been selected to show his work at such a premier London event.

“We have in ACE highly talented students who are very creative in their approach to design,” said Professor Abdalla.

Tom said that his time studying Architecture at UEL had been invaluable.

“I feel I have grasped a greater understanding of the Architecture profession and have developed a good architectural design mind alongside my interests. The lecturers have been inspirational.”

Tom is currently dividing his time between studying for his MA Urban Design at UEL and working at Sheppard Robson Architects."

University of East London, News and Press Releases by Bevan Frank, 25.11.2014

End of Year Show Review

Following extract is from the article "Student Shows 2014: University of East London" in the AJ - Architects Journal by Tim Pitman, director of Pitman Tozer Architects, 25.07.2014

"Standout Units & Students

In Diploma, Context City, run by Christoph Hadrys and Uwe Schmidt-Hess, has resulted in a series of well-presented schemes that are resolved at all scales: from convincing urban masterplanning strategies through to highly defined interior spaces.

Overall, Leoni Brooks and Tom Green stand out within the already noted Context City unit, and Shinnosuke Hoshikawa’s alternative form of architecture school displays similar levels of scheme resolution and quality of presentation."
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