DS05

Framing the Invisible: Navigating Flux in Soho's Urban Fabric

We are concerned with the multidimensionality of layered urban landscapes—recognising the flux that resides in what’s included as well as what is excluded, what is visible as well as what is hidden. We ask: How do our existential and transgressive experiences shape the values we construct, and through what processes do we affirm or negate these values? Our site of investigation is Soho, London, where the future lives in traces of the past.

Soho's evolution is a story of changing social and cultural dynamics, economic shifts, and immigration. Over the centuries, it has transformed from open farmland to an elite residential neighbourhood, then into an overcrowded and impoverished area, and later a bustling, cosmopolitan district. Today, it is home to upscale galleries, hospitality venues, and media companies.

We “measure”, “interface”, and “border” our relation to Soho by making moving images that provide a lens through which we explore spatial and temporal fragmentation, offering insight into the ways in which a sense of space is constructed.

We imagine spaces that challenge or disrupt normal use patterns to encourage new ways of interacting with space—looking at existing pockets of spaces as lived, changeable, expendable life-value sources to be used, reused, misused, or disused.

Tutors: Raha Farazmand - Kiril Kuzmanov - Marko Milovanovic

Guests: Adrian Robinson

Students: Abdallah Bichu, Alexandria Casemore, Alivia Koh, Ana Volkova, Ayush Chandorkar, Devaansh Agarwal, Falak Syed, Harry Kingham, Mohammad Miri, Paige Tay, Pooja Dubey, Pranjali Mhase, Shalomi Ninan, Aaron Barrett, Thomas Denby

Fossilized Fragmentation of the Blue

Paige Tay

Located in the heart of Soho, this project transforms the historic Blue Plaque into a fragmented museum, not housed within a single building, but scattered throughout the city. Each intervention marks a moment where memory collides with space, and the invisible layers of the past are brought into contact with the present. The Blue Plaque becomes more than a commemorative marker; it becomes a portal to the fourth dimension, where time folds, loops, and fragments.

Guided by the Jester, a symbolic trickster who navigates the boundaries of time and perception, visitors encounter sculptural artefacts embedded in overlooked urban corners, above eye level, in architectural recesses, or merging with building facades. These artefacts represent collisions of memory: fragments shaped by the ghostly presence of lives once lived, encoded into form.

The architectural strategy is deliberately light-touch. Rather than replacing or overshadowing, the interventions take up minimal space, preserving the function of existing buildings. Materials are drawn from the surrounding environment, subtly contrasting to evoke a temporal disruption. Each component blurs thresholds, between indoor and outdoor, object and environment, to provoke curiosity and reflection.

This is not a traditional museum. It is a dispersed experience, an invitation to traverse fractured timelines and confront what has been forgotten. In a district threatened by gentrification and commercial erasure, this project does not aim to restore the past but to unsettle the present by revealing the hidden layers of history embedded in the architecture of everyday life.

Achieving Immortality

Harry Stephen Kingham

Soho square as a gallery space for immortality.

This project explores avenues of creating immortality through 5 installations. By defining immortality within the conceptual and spatial canvas that is the Charles 2nd statue within Soho square. The square becomes a gallery space, one that is rooted in themes of affirmation and negation and Bataille’s ideas of expenditure.

The statue becomes a focal point for this immortality. Through mapping, archiving and spatial analyses, the project speculates how immortality might be granted to the statue.

These explorations become a dynamic interplay between rituals of both confession and waste disposal. In line with the studio’s ethos of speculative and accountable explorations, this work blends abstract philosophical critique with tangible architectural interventions to ultimately make a statement. Immortality is impossible, but chasing it is mortality.