The Rooftop City

By Alex Scott-Whitby

Childhood memories of looking up at a city that towered over me and engulfed my senses lead me in some way to the decision to embark on my architectural training (even if I have run away from it a few times!). Having always been fascinated as to how and why a city evolves, changes, and continuously updates itself as if a living organism.

I am investigating the city from a new vantage point. A point that some people have the privilege to view and possibly take for granted on a daily basis, yet others never see or hardly even know exists. This space is the rooftops of the City of London. A realm made famous by Mary Poppins and her chimney sweep friends, countless films, operas and musicals.

So where does this take me? Hopefully on a journey of discovery where I will explore unknown lands and topographies, meet the people who have the privilege to dwell and inhabit this territory, and document what exactly goes on in these realms. Hopefully along the way I will constantly ask myself what it means to be a city dweller; how is it that the majority of us never look up. I would like to analyse our fascination with the rooftops and its alluring quality that means when accessible, people flock like birds to even the most baron of ledges.

This project is about re-evaluating my experience of the city by snatching at new vistas, looking down instead of up and taking the time to contemplate how the city’s roofscape has evolved and changed.

Urban Tooling : livelihoods and neighbourhoods

by Crystal Whitaker

“Let me put it to you this way, my friend: some say this is Serbia,
some say Albania. The Lord only knows which of the two it really is.
So who owns this accursed plain where we spilled our blood, the
Blackbird Plain, as they call it? It was there, my brother, that the
fighting started – a hundred, maybe even two hundred years ago.”

from Three Elegies for Kosovo
Ismail Kadare




An architectural commission for the Filigran craftsmen of Prizren


The symbolic power of the land in territories fractured by war generates a frenzied urbanism and architectural expression that bears witness to the traumas of a population. The political dynamics of Kosovo have been associated with oppression, expulsion, violence and genocide, as the country’s name conjures in the minds of many who remember the Balkan wars of the 1990s. In fact, it has long been a contested territory, sitting at the threshold between the Ottoman lands and the Mediterranean; its soil, rich in minerals and metals, the prize in tribal battles that have swept the Slavic lands for centuries.

Kosovo has been a United Nations administered territory for the last decade, since the NATO bombings which drove Serb forces out in 1999. Having recently declared independence, the country of ‘Young Europeans’ is having to equip itself with the organisational mechanisms that will allow it to develop on its own terms. With this comes the responsibility to develop sustainably, in environmental, social and cultural terms.

This Urban Tooling project combines the necessity of economic development with the importance for weaving a true social coherence into a society that remains, under the surface, divided. It proposes metabolisms of vocational training, apprenticeships, guilds and cooperatives – as alternatives to a ‘paper education’ – which focus on crafts, trades and hand skills, and in this way seeks to instil the art of making as a vehicle for binding diverse peoples. It ‘en-tools’; it will suggest potentials for urban alterations while handing over the mechanisms for realisation to its inhabitants. Prizren becomes an urban workshop, within which is embedded and interwoven a human, urban and ecological infrastructure.

The English Country Estate - A New Public House

The English Country Estate was once a social and political centre of the countryside. During the Medieval period, known as the lost great English Hospitality, the House would have fed and entertained anyone who passed through its land.

The services it provided - millhouses, dairies, schools - physically bonded the community together. But let's not be too nastalgic, it was a feudal system in which people traded freedom for security.

A Public House is a project based on one such country estate in the West Midlands, in the heart of the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution. It looks at finding a new role for the estate to relate to its community both at the local and regional level. In particular it is concerned with the continuing craft tradition in the area as well as the manufacturing sector; both of which are undergoing once-in-a-lifetime technological and practice changes.

The project will utilise modern day technological advances such as DIY manufacturing and the Open Source movement, as well as reinterpret traditional social models such as the Guilds - to create a contemporary public role for the estate.

By Jing Lu

Growing space: fertile environments for plants and people

As the global environment changes, basic issues surrounding the necessities of life rise to their rightful place. Food, the mode of its production, and the onward sustainability of these processes is one of these subjects.

Education is the only way to effectively safeguard our future and teaching the next generation about the importance of plants to all life is key.

‘Growing our future’ is a community gardening project based on the edge of school grounds in a town called Okehampton, in southwest England. This involves a learning space which will serve as a home and face for the whole project and help build the relationships between school and community.

By Thomas Randall-Page

Projeto Pereirão

by João Andre Wrobel

A new community creche for the favela Vila Pereira da Silva (Pereirão), in Rio de Janeiro, was proposed by the city council in 1998. To this day, the site for which the creche was designed remains empty. My aim is to develop a new proposal for the site which is relevant and responsive to the resident's needs.

My first experience of Vila Pereira da Silva was through volunteering with the Project Morrinho NGO in September 2009. The Morrinho model, which was started by local youth in 1997, is a 320m² model of the city constructed from bricks and other recycled materials. It began as a simple childhood game to escape from the realities of violence and corruption that surrounded the teens and their community.

I am proposing to design a new community space for the vacant site, using the Morrinho model as a means to engage the community in Rio de Janeiro. Instead of designing from the outside-in, I hope that by using the Morrinho model as a tool to envisage the new space, the community can take an active role in its design.

Follow my project's development here: http://projetopereirao.wordpress.com

baked potato world in 199 words

by Guy Shenton


The project starts with the assumption that natural resources will become scarcer in the near future and that technological change will also change and/or decrease the type of jobs that people do, the combined effect will be to increase the value of materials relative to the value of human labor.

I see these changes as opportunity that allow a less wasteful and more socially fulfilling way of life, where more aspects of life take place in public, using shared spaces and resources.

To facilitate this I shall be designing a series of small and medium sized interventions that perform public uses. Possibilities may include: A baked potato dispenser, a shared tool cupboard, a kitchen or garden for hire, a sauna.

I shall also examine which forms of housing this suggests.

I plan to design the interventions themselves and also the systems / companies that will run them. The systems can operate using money, non- monetary exchanges, government sponsorship or good will, it is likely that all of the above will be used in some way. I am interested in using a combination of both high and low tech concepts. Some interventions will be automated and some will be ran by people.