Designing With Bata
Initial conversations with members of the Bata Heritage Centre and resident's on their lived memories of place and East Tilbury's shift into urban precarity.
Photograph from Plur-ticipatory Sessions, East Tilbury Hub
Mapping and Expanding Urban Conversations, In-Situ
Having developed an in-depth understanding of the past and present through interviews,. emails and open working group conversations, a series of agonisms in relation to the Community, Liveability and the Environment were brought into public conversation, where members of the wider public were invited to respond to (re) configurations of East Tilbury town for future inhabitation.
Photograph from Plur-ticipatory Sessions, Stanford House
Plur-ticipation Transcribed : In The Soil
Conceptual transcriptions from the discussions held on-site informed the development of 3 speculative masterplans investigating the historical themes of commoning through The Piscary, The Estover and In The Soil. Here, the proposal is designed with the cycles of the soil and the seasons, to speculate on how climatic change can organise a symbiotic landscape.
1:5000 Physical Model in Colorplan and Sheet Materials
Towards A New Commons
Developing the socio-material of the Public Common Partnership and Commonhold Cycle, the speculative masterplan investigating the Estover through the rhythms of the forest, it's natural nursery biomes and local flora simultaneously becomes a diagram towards the centrifugal, de-centralised network for collective commons expansion.
1:5000 Physical Model in Colorplan and Sheet Materials
Of Piscary: Investigations into Living With The Tide and An Afforestated Edge
Dynamic Estuaries : A Negotiated Masterplan, Co-Designed Future Configurations of the Settlements
Commoning As Masterplan: 1:1000 Models Investigating The Piscary, The Estover and In The Soil
Collaborating On The Estuarial Edge
Learning from the unrealised expansion of the Bata Estate planned for the late 1940s, a new collaborative map of East Tilbury's relationship to the Thames and t symbiotic nodes of commoning are placed, drawn, mapped, negotiated, contested and traced onto the topography.
Hybridised Digital Drawing
Commoning As 'Master' Plan - Piscary Living
As part of the design strategy for the Piscary, the floodplain and consequentially, the River will be widened to allow for controlled water ingress into existing land. Turning to water and estuarial architectures found in low-lying areas and confluence based settlements, how could a new relation to inhabitation and water become proposed?
Digital Render
Commoning As 'Master' Plan - EstovervLiving Living
As part of the design strategy for the Estover, which simultaneously serves as an afforestation and re-wilding of the land surrounding East Tilbury, new strategies of living with timber that is attuned to the lifecycle and the life of trees is designed. Could a slow and fast forest be proposed to sustain ecological regeneration and the (Future) production of nomadic architecture(s) on site?
Digital Render
Re-storing A Vulnerable Landscape
As the ecological restoration of the precarious estuarial landscape takes place throughout the first few decades of the scheme, fresh water points, canalways and polders are also sculpted into the landscape to support future living and ecological systems proliferating on site, concurrently safeguarding the Bata Estate further inland.
Digital Render
DESIGNING WITH BATA : A Dynamic Masterplan for Enabling the East Tilbury Commons
Through an investigation into the multiplicity of “Utopias” that could arise on site, a participatory device that engages with local residents and actors on designing and co-producing these incomplete, and envisioned futures was developed. Taking the form of a collapsible toolkit, it was first tested at Dawson’s Heights to (co)produce responses to speculative reimaginings of the estate. Having developed a working methodology in engagement practice, we move to the Bata Estate in East Tilbury , a radical company town which was once at the forefront of live-work relations and modernist construction which has fallen into a state of precariousness and deprivation since the shuttering of Bata Shoes. Through the toolkit, a catalogue of resident’s memories and ambitions for East Tilbury were developed, where the written Thesis develops this into a pluralistic mode of participation that enables multiplicity in urban ambitions and “utopias” to be made visible. As part of a symbiotic discussion, this in-situ research that underpins the development of the New Doggerland was shared with the community to allocate Heritage Funding for their Bata Memories Centre.
Acknowledging the socio-ecological crises that are resultant of our extreme consumption and resource extraction, a dynamic, reactionary and arguably incomplete “master” plan is proposed…
Awards /
RIBA Silver Medal Commendation, 2020
The Bartlett School of Architecture Medal, 2020
Distinction in Design
Project / MArch (Year 5) Architectural Design - Research, Bartlett Unit 13
Design Tutors / Sabine Storp + Patrick Weber
Year / 2020