During this teaching year at the Bartlett School of Architecture, I began teaching with Zachary Fluker of Ao-Ft in our co-developed: Unit 2: Systems of Exchange. Our focus revolved around the urban challenges faced by cities like London, with a particular emphasis on affordable living, housing, and shared facilities in the city’s boroughs. As a unit, we strongly believe that self-build practices offer significant potential in addressing these concerns, and our goal was to tap into this potential and explore the socio-technical dimensions of these systems through the teaching framework.

(Image: Aryan Kaul)

Unit Support: Simon Beames, Dr. Beatrice De Carli, Alberto Fernandez Gonzalez, Tamara Khan, Jakub Klaska, Tony Le, Rowan Mackay, James Palmer, Thomas Parker, Liz Tatarintseva, Synnove Fredericks, Yağiz Söylev, Eric Crevels, Jonathan Tyrell, Egmontas Geras, Sarah Harding, Margarita Garfias Royo , Elly Selby, Isaac Simpson, Liz Tatarintseva, Unit 21, Unit 09

Our unit’s longer-term objective is to unlock the potential of human-centered, community-based systems through genuine exchanges of “hand-made data” and contextually valuable resources. To begin this, we directed our efforts towards supporting existing community self-build projects in East London, particularly in the Borough of Tower Hamlets this year. We aimed to engage with the challenges and opportunities in urban exchange systems across physical and virtual realms.

Throughout the year, our students critically questioned the concept of DIY culture and evaluated the empowering potential of self-build practices, allowing individuals to actively shape the cities they inhabit. All sites chosen for our projects were existing identified Self-Build sites by the Tower Hamlet’s Local Council, part of the Greater London authority’s Self-Build schemes.

Our students explored self-build architectures in these contexts and developed their own documentation and design techniques in response. We aimed to create responsible processes that strike a balance between individual and mass production, virtual and physical realms, and considerations of both small and large scales.