Design Studio (Two) One Architecture BA (Hons)

TUTORS: Corinna Dean & Tadeas Riha

Island Fictions

Our studio explores and speculates on futures of care for the liminal space between nature, urban water systems and post-industrial landscapes.

Channelsea Island inscribes the interplay of water, labour and industry in the landscape of the Lea Valley. Secluded and inaccessible to humans for the past thirty years, it is a fragment of wilderness in the dense post-industrial fabric of Newham. Reading the past and present, we proposed our own imaginary fictions, imagining futures for the island that would not disrupt its exceptional status.

Our studio promoted reading text and reading landscape. We approached the site as both a microcosm and a fictional laboratory – a place where built and unbuilt worlds overlap, and where we can imagine new layers of architectural possibility. Today, at the crossing of natural and artificial water infrastructures, the site dissolves into vegetation and ruins. Human-made infrastructures lapse into precious ecologies.

Archive of DS2.1’s work from previous years: