This year the University of Brighton’s BA Architecture Studio 01 is working in the context of London’s Regent Street and Regent’s Park. As with previous years spent exploring Winchelsea and Alfriston, we are investigating the planning and...
moreThis year the University of Brighton’s BA Architecture Studio 01 is working in the context of London’s Regent Street and Regent’s Park. As with previous years spent exploring Winchelsea and Alfriston, we are investigating the planning and making of the built environment. We are interested in how we can learn from the character of a place when developing our architectural ideas and what it means to design new buildings within a distinctive established context.
Regent Street is a line drawn through the city by an architect’s hand, a meridian that runs from St James’s Park to Regent’s Park through the heart of London. But this is not a straight axis; it is a sinuous line that bends and curves to step around different land ownerships, to plug into pre-existing streets and buildings, to create views and vistas, to build profit as well as beauty. This grand project of urban planning, architecture and landscaping was conceived by John Nash in the early 19th Century for the Crown Estate and named after the Prince Regent.
Regent Street and its linked spaces cut a section through London. This line stretches from the ‘rural’ trees of St James’s Park in the south up the grand stairs at Carlton House Terrace, through residential streets and civic spaces, past cultural institutions and members’ clubs to a crescendo of movement at Piccadilly Circus. From there, intensive commercial life and retail consumerism line the route to Oxford Circus after which the line moves out again past professional institutions and terraces to the open greenery of Regent’s Park. Finally, at the northern end of the scheme the Regent’s Canal ties this whole territory to the former industrial quarters of Paddington, Camden, King’s Cross and the Docklands.
The Nash scheme brought together dreams of urban grandeur with property development. It manifests the idea that a city’s buildings and spaces can be designed together as an elegant stage set for life while also meeting the requirements of commerce, housing, transportation and industry, producing a townscape of drama, contrast, civility and architectural invention.
In the work of Studio 01 this year we position ourselves within Regent Street, Regent’s Park and the Regent’s Canal as they are today. Though much of the original architecture is no longer standing, the power and overall logic of the design endures, a testament to the way cities and buildings change and how spatial designs both evolve and leave their traces over time. This is a world of neoclassical facades, brand new buildings, colonnades, level changes, alleyways, stone and stucco, brick and glass, crowds, quiet libraries, trees, neon, tow paths, barges, palaces and a zoo.
The following pages illustrate the wealth of work produced by second and third year students in term 1 of the academic year 2013-2014. Through five exercises we have investigated Regent Street at different scales to explore its many characteristics. In the first of these, Meridian, we have reflected on a personal interpretation of architectural ordering and developed this as a spatial exploration. In Line Through The City we interpreted Nash’s section through London as a whole, while in Draw Everything we focused in detail on some of the particular spaces opened up or left behind by this and other grand gestures. We have responded to these places by proposing an Addition to them, accentuating or contrasting their spatial character. From these initial probes we have identified spatial and architectural themes which we have explored in a series of Fragments suggestive of the built proposals that we will design in the next two terms.
Studio 01 is led by Alex Arestis and Ben Sweeting
