Design Studio (Two) Seven Architecture BA (Hons)

TUTORS: Diony Kypraiou & Sam Aitkenhead

Performing Archives

The studio positions architecture as a performing archive through which historical knowledge is constructed, staged and reactivated. 

Students began by developing intensive site-based investigations through walking, mapping and material observation to produce hybrid cartographies that interwove physical and immaterial traces of London’s Smithfield Market, a site defined by dense temporal layering and ongoing urban transformation. 

Historic voices were embedded in these pieces, surfacing contested narratives which culminated in the Display Incubator: a spatial device that revealed and re-performed hidden urban conditions. 

This research was then translated into architectural propositions through the design of a Performing Archive that synthesised theatre, archival practice and civic space. Rather than a static, inaccessible repository, the archive was interrogated as an active condition where memory is produced through movement, encounter and bodily occupation. Working with existing structures, students employed parasitic interventions to transform Smithfield into an evolving field of collective memory and spatial performance.