Hidden Communities

Abstract

When the British arrived in the colonial countries, they had the opportunity to adapt the architecture of the local culture to their needs, but centuries later, when the ethnic groups arrived in “postcolonial” London, they did not have the opportunity to have a manifest effect on the built environment and neither the development of the city consider this situation as a problem to tackle. Today, years into the process of decolonization, the situation is still not much different. This occidental acceptance of people separated from their way of living, their culture reflected in the urban structure, creates the hybrid urban environment that hides the existence of different cultures. This oxymoronic thinking concerning diversity creates the complex mechanism of merging cultures, backgrounds, and customs and hides everything different or other. As a result of this situation, it is possible to point toward placeless cultures in the city of London. People or locations that are culturally significant without any material or immaterial connection to their urban surroundings. They maybe are located in the cartesian urban space of London, but they are placeless in the imaginary and mental view of the city. We need to abandon the occidental approach in architecture as we develop our neighborhoods to create a city that belongs to everybody and nobody, to create a city where everything is placeless and placeness.

The design is composed of 3 connected layers of togetherness with different levels of publicness which I categorize as communality, commensality, and conviviality. While communality of the project is completely public, the publicness of the building decreases with commensality and conviviality but still keeps the aspect of togetherness. They are not completely separated, on the contrary, they feed on each other. The layers of the project bridge with each other in different ways. This connection happens, either by the literal circulation of people and goods or by other means such as the visual connection or change in temporality. Hence the design pushes people to gather not only through planned encounters with the program it offers but also through incidental encounters that happen along the connections of different functions.