Post-Pandemic Condenser.

A design that re-imagines the Architectural Condenser to accommodate the programmatic structure of people’s lives post-pandemic within a form that integrates principles of both urban and nomadic conditions to co-exist.

This project is inspired by the limitations on movement during the coronavirus pandemic, restricting people to localised boundaries. The design proposed focuses particularly on the changing relationship between people’s home and working lives, allocating space designed specifically for each.

Remote working has highlighted that we no longer need to locate ourselves in a centralised office to conduct our work, allowing us to work from home or a location of our choosing. In turn it has also impacted our ability to balance the remainder of our daily activities and therefore our overall well-being. This in-balance in relationship and physical overlap in space (mainly for remote workers) is discussed in more detail in my specialism submission for this year.

My design addresses the restrictions of a defined boundary by implementing lessons learnt from nomadic architecture. An architecture that works within a localised boundary, blurring the thresholds between internal and external spaces as well as built form and landscape. The result of this is a set of design principles that create an interplay between urban built form and its integration to an existing landscape.

In a response to this, my design process explores how new architecture could do both. Integrate the programmatic layout associated with urban form and set it within a fabricated topography that reflects the surrounding context of Newhaven and the South Downs back drop.

The idea of condensing aspects of people’s daily lives into a given boundary spawned out of early twentieth century soviet architecture. Ginzburg, the founding architect of the social condenser showed how arrangement, materiality and interaction with the external environment all played a role in successfully condensing aspects of peoples lives into his designs. Through diagrammatic analysis I have shown how Ginzburg’s principles of the social condenser have impacted the urban elements of my design. With particular interest being taken on how he maintained interaction between residents and the external environment (nature) when using the circulation of his buildings and occupying their dwellings.

This visual connection between the internal and external spaces is a different approach to the physical nature in which nomadic architecture explores it. By creating a design that explores this balances from both perspectives it attempts to create a condenser of programme as well as form.