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B-Pro Show 2023

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Carpenters Fedora

Project details

Programme

Cluster RC1

Year 1

The Carpenters Estate in East London is a site composed of low-rise, high-rise and public space community housing, and is set to be the future site of a redevelopment scheme that will have undesirable impacts on the current tenants. The project aims to propose an alternative method for community relocation by enabling current residents to negotiate their own relocation on site, modifying their current dwellings to account for new and old needs unmet by their current homes. Taking the ‘Fedora’ in Italo Calvino’s book ‘Invisible Cities’ as a starting point, the proposal explores how the future of community housing can resist homogeneity and instead embrace the heterogeneity of people, wants, and needs.

Students

Site Introduction

Map Research of London

The Carpenters Estate was chosen by overlaying information on the population types, diversity of beliefs and ethnicity, and trends in population density and growth in London.

Site Status

The Carpenters Estate is close to Stratford station, a large public transport hub. There are three building types in the Carpenters Estate: 22-storey tower blocks, three-storey apartment blocks, and two-storey terraced houses.

Site Survey and Interview

In our survey and interviews, residents expressed concerns about the safety of the structures of their homes, future ownership rights, future rent, and other aspects of the house.

Timeline

The Carpenters Estate has a winding history. It was built at the end of the nineteenth century, but two thirds of it were destroyed during World War II. The current homes were rebuilt in 1968 but have hardly been repaired or maintained since.

House Safety Issue

Many of the houses in the Carpenters Estate have varying degrees of aging floors, roofs, and walls, which have been assessed by engineers. According to the Building Safety Act, Newham council provides two options for residents: repair or rebuild.

Community Layout

Every resident is one independent vote of the building they live in, and they can use this vote to decide the future of the whole building and negotiate with other residents to reach an agreement.

Form Generation

Deconstruction of Old Typologies

The three existing home typologies on the site were disassembled, measured and counted in terms of building components and materials, and summarised in a centralised manner.

Material Library

The Yolo V7 object detection algorithm is used to input a large number of example images to identify and label the types and materials of dismantled components.

Spatial Distribution of Particles

As Carpenters Fedora aims to create a collective community with maximum sharing space, residents need to score preferences from several types of sharing behaviour patterns, which correspond to eight types of clusters.

Data Meshing of Spatial Distribution

After a preliminary map of the distribution of particles in the community is produced, the particles labelled as different clusters are materialised into a 6m x 6m volume known as voxel, which is the size of a housing unit.

Air Gallery and Transportation Core

Residents in the Carpenter Estate complained about the lack of public space in the old neighbourhood, so additional air galleries were created to connect directly to the entrance of each unit, which also turned the roof into a movable space.

Optimisation of Public Space

The layout of public space is generated by generative adversarial network technology. The architect then builds the results into a three-dimensional model and conducts agent simulation to get a heatmap.

Space Design

Behavioural Patterns of Different Family Structures

Carpenter Fedora embraces the diversity of different families.

Living Units

Residents can make adjustments to the unit plan samples provided to obtain a three-dimensional spatial representation. The first aggregated community size is the number of households currently living in the old community, about 78 households.

Voxel Connection Rules

After the residents have designed the façade of their house, each household needs to connect the entrance side with the outermost air corridor and ensure that the rest of the faces do not cross with the neighbours.

Wave Function Collapse

The results of each generation will be published on the platform, and the neighbours themselves can vote twice to decide whether to be adopted.

Border Negotiation Game

Residents can exchange the functionality and size of the space with their neighbours.

Wall Assembly Game

In the wall assembly game, the simulation tries to show a complex system, giving residents freedom. Users can choose the type, size, and colour of materials according to their preferences, and personalise the appearance of their house.

Community Construction

Wall Assembly

Wall structures are reclaimed paying attention to their original shapes, cut in ‘N’ and ‘L’ shapes. Certain principles are developed to reconnect doors, windows, and wall components.

Combination Prefab

A list of wall combination prefabs is created for the residents. They can choose their size, colour, and material. The video game encourages residents to design their own walls by playing wall assembly games.

Unit Construction

The house of each family is the smallest building unit in the community. After finishing the construction of a unit, a tower crane is used to move it to the position selected by residents.

Construction Scene

The deconstruction of old and new houses is conducted simultaneously.

New Carpenters Estate

After two years of construction, the newly built Carpenters Estate becomes a diverse community containing repaired houses, single and connected rebuilt homes.