Review
Before the exams, we had a review session to check our progress before the final exam in June. The review was attended by a limited audience, including Tania Lopez Winkler and guest critic Jim Eyre, who served on the panel. During the review, I presented my latest design scheme through drawings and models, building on my field research and the feedback I received during the midterm review. Specifically, I focused on the organization of space and program, aiming to strike a balance between the needs of parents and children while facilitating the exchange of knowledge and skills.
Through community workshops and field research, I learned that mothers of young children in Woolwich face various challenges that relate to after school care. The cost of childcare is high, at £32,000 per annum. As a result, many women are forced to leave the workforce to care for their families, and the number of women who dropped out of the workforce has increased by 5% in the last year. Many mothers face stalled careers after having children, with 68% reporting this issue. The lack of affordable and flexible childcare is a significant barrier to mothers who want to increase their earnings and work more hours. Rising energy bills, inflation and high interest rates also add to the financial burden faced by these mothers.
My response is a versatile child care and coworking space that can be used for care outside of school hours. The project considers three kinds of play, recreational sports, children’s play and adult intellectual play - interlocking them spatially in one exploratory space: 25 Bowater Road, the former home of the Siemens Brothers Factory where currently, the concrete, industrial building has fallen into disuse.
The design of the project begins at the Greenwich Trust Secondary School and Windrush Primary School, with a pedestrianized journey between the schools and the project site. The ground level of the project creates a public square featuring basketball and football courts for everyone to use. An existing cafe, ‘The Chef’s House’ and a new kitchenette will provide food and drink, with outdoor seating areas scattered throughout the site. Above the ground level is an elevated running track with tensiled netting suspended in between adjacent buildings, providing children with new and exciting vantage points around the site. More serious and private functions, such as mothers' rooms, sleeping rooms, laundry facilities, yoga studios, meeting rooms, and toilets, anchor the building on the east and west sides. The top floor inverts the spatial qualities of the ground plane, creating an enclosed running track and garden oasis for parents only to rejuvenate and take some time for themselves. The design aims to provide a welcoming and inclusive environment for everyone, with a particular focus on encouraging play, skill-sharing, and a safe space to think and focus.
I believe that my scheme enhances the developer’s existing proposal, offering something more daring and exuberant. Our site is a transitional industrial area where 374 new affordable homes will be built - occupied by first time buyers and their young families, mixed in with new employment spaces, and a business incubator called the Wire Workshop. The aim is to foster innovation and economic growth in the wider area, while also creating a welcoming environment for local residents and businesses to deliver long-term economic benefits to the community.
On a personal level, during my brief time working in New York, I also noticed that women seem to have had more emotional, and familial responsibilities in terms of housework, involvement with school events, and even party planning in the office. This sentiment might touch on the unequal and systemic gender imbalance when it comes to emotional labour in the workforce, but regardless, I was always amazed by them because they had the ability to balance work, and family, all the while being the smartest voices in the room. I have come to the conclusion that I wanted my project to create conditions that alleviate the burden of these mothers and be part of a larger conversation about the realities of childcare, and about transforming the dominant mode of design from luxury in the interest of capital to design as direct aid in the interest of many. Although my scheme cannot address gender imbalance and child care as effectively as organizing and policy making, I truly believe that creating the environments and conditions to nurture care, exchange skills, and build community can bring about positive change.
“Remember, interior design is about people first. Because without people, you don’t need spaces.”
The work was unfortunately not that well received. The most piercing comments were about the all white model and my recent work that steered far away from the tactile, playful and experimental qualities of my earlier work during the first semester. Jim and Tania emphasized that interior design was about considering people first in the design process. Children have a real preference for soft surfaces and tactile spaces. They suggested incorporating and reintroducing the ‘patchwork’ style that I have used before. More importantly, I need to stop thinking about the building as an object, and focus on creating experiences that cater to the needs and interests of the family that I interviewed in Hong Kong. They felt that I was playing it safe and not being brave enough with my experimentation for this project.
Jim Eyre: “I am going to go back to the basketball hoop chair, and the reason for that chair. I think they should be your characters. I love the fact that you you're continuing a project from the beginning of the year. So you have accumulated a whole heap of knowledge that you have learned and extracted from your relationship this or, and your experience of meeting this family, right. So I think that's a great case study and you should build this whole project for them. I like forgetting these very nice architectural models. I've been looking at that rug for your whole presentation. This is so lovely. It's tactile and rough. It looks like it's been sewn by child. There’s language in that. Patchwork is so beautifully childlike, it's how you create memories on blanket, you piece together bits of material to create memories. So to sort of take that sewing language and use it, and then to relate it to that image. That's how you create interiors, is how you create experience. The work needs to coexist together, then then you can quite quickly see how it's going to traverse from a physical object via a contextual plan to your work. And then it translates into furniture, and all those sorts of lovely things, and then into modelmaking.”
