City Rituals. The Field

Abstract

Social life in a modern city is conditioned by long-established traditions, cultural codes, and patterns of human behavior. Such aspects will be individual for almost any city since their formation takes place over long periods. A similar activator of social life in London is the beer culture – a complex ritual chain that has lost one of the most important constituent element – the brewery as a typology. As a result, the brewery lost its architectural identity and its place of honor in the city. The central issue addressed in this study is the search for the reasons why the brewery typology has lost its architectural identity in recent years and whether it is possible to rethink the identity of the typology as an approach to design.
The number of new London breweries is growing inexorably. Over the past ten years, it has increased more than ten times, which indicates that the beer culture has experienced a new understanding, and broader demand for the consumption of this product has formed in society. However, due to the comparative youth of the new format and approach to beer culture and its economic uncertainty, it has not yet been architecturally formed. Hence, it exists in a format of technological adaptation rather than an independent typology.
The primary method in the study is the analysis of historical and cultural analogs, and as a result, their comparison with the brewery in different qualities, such as typology, program, function, urban fabric, etc. Using this induction method, we get the necessary conclusions, which are subsequently transformed into specific architectural approaches and rules required to create a new identity of the brewery typology and a new fragment of the urban fabric in heterogeneous London.