The Urban Plot-Play of XL Architecture

The studio started with one’s own neighbourhood, as its point of departure, focusing on a narrative interplay through mediums of photography, film, model making and other representational systems. Each student understood and formed their site using their most intimate knowledge and memories of their neighbourhood as notions of context that were investigated at urban, architectural and human scales. Understanding tools of narration and representations as key instruments of starting a design - our focus was to generate an architecture from the ‘outside’ - where the idea of the public realm/ space, social identity and ritualised time became parameters that are engaged with. We seeked an architecture that reflects notions of preservation, cultural memory and identity as it simultaneously drives to engage with technological progress and new systems of production/ consumption that imposes programmatic variability. Beyond great architecture as an end goal, the emphasis of the studio was also to understand design as a process that generates questions - to address the present as we build for the future; to address themes of identity and global exchange as we understand and inflect your most intimate spatial and cultural practices