Design Studio 17 Master of Architecture (MArch RIBA Part 2)

TUTORS: Jane Tankard & Jake Parkin

In Search of Bedlam

DS17 situates the city as a contested political field, a terrain of social and spatial exchange where imposed order meets lived disorder, held between alienation and delirium. 

The original Bedlam hospital stands as a prototype of surveillance and display; a civic theatre of madness whose legacy persists in contemporary systems of control, from the commodification of housing to architectures of exclusion and the psychologies of digital capitalism.

Working along the viaduct edge between Bethnal Green and Shoreditch, centred on Pedley Street where communal and collective life is still haunted by post-war clearance, the unit re-read Bedlam as an urban condition embedded within systems of hegemony and capital. Drawing on Marx and Freud, Derrida, Cixous and Lavin, the studio relocated Bedlam’s pathology as a critical design methodology, proposing architecture as permeable and contingent, a medium that leaks and adapts.

Moving from urban strategy to architectural intervention, environmental detail and material fragment, projects responded through serial architectures of alternative civic life. Long drawings, short films, 3D printed elements and speculative models built, through frame, sequence and montage, a cinematic spatial language through which to interpret the city as event, residue and rupture. Taking an activist position, the work seeks spatial redress through generosity, porosity and occupation, and asks how architecture might support those denied agency and how collective life can emerge through infiltration, contingency and the uncanny. Proposals acted as civic and environmental condensers, intensifying gathering, hybridity and microclimate while pushing against the ordinary and the commodified.