UNIT H: Common Spectacles

Unit H is focused on the city as a never ending conversation, where people’s ideas are tested and nurtured, adopted and displaced. Not a place to be rationalised, but tangled dialogue that architects can learn to negotiate.

This year we have been exploring the role design can play as the mediator between local eccentricities, perceptions and national/global trends. By investigating how to construct a spectacle of the everyday we imagine how this could redefine our public buildings/spaces as playful and experiential civic centres that embrace their role as places of social, cultural and political exchange. Where the inevitable negotiation and compromise manifests in democratic space, that is inclusive and transient, rather than autocratic and inflexible.

Nowhere is this idea of exchange more prevalent than in our marketplaces. However, here it is not only commodities and commerce that are traded, but ideas, cultures, knowledge, skills and experience.

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Unit G

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Unit J