AJ Student Prize 2023: The London School of Architecture

About the London School of Architecture

Postgraduate

Elliott Wang

Course MArch in Designing Architecture
Studio/unit brief Design Thesis and Sythesis
Project title The Grand Domestic

Project description This project presents a new form of domestic life centred on recognising the value of reproductive labour and its potential to challenge the domestic sphere. It shows collective living where housework equates to other forms of market labour, turning away from a capitalist agenda of consumerism and its tropes of individualism, quasi-efficiency and exacerbation of gender inequalities. It adopts a nuanced version of the hotel-apartment, separating domestic processes into collective space. The project is on the Museum of London site, including Bastion House, with the museum’s galleries repurposed into collective spaces, separated into areas of process and inactivity. Labour is celebrated in grand, decorated spaces, furnished with new forms of collective cleaning equipment which operate as social mechanisms. Consequently, the nature of these activities, at scale, becomes more energy and cost-effective. The dwellings rise above this in two blocks: existing and new. The apartments are stripped-back, designed as an escape from labour, with just three types of room: bedrooms, bathrooms and shared living, with a communal portego connecting all dwellings.

Tutor citation The scheme is presented in such a way that it is at times surreal and at others ordinary. It captures the mood and truths of the times we are in. Elliott’s portfolio as a whole is an exciting and rigorous body of work that makes a highly relevant contribution to architectural discourse. Esther Escribano, Matthew Whittaker