Diploma 2 explores the reorientation of the architect’s role, shifting the focus from serving the financiers of architecture to adopting a bottom-up approach that allows architects to initiate their own projects with communities and work with them as partners. This reorientation goes hand-in-hand with the disruptive emerging technologies of blockchain and its decentralisation of finance. As digital technology begins to influence social and economic structures, as well as political institutions, the unit takes a critical view of these emerging technologies while cherry-picking their creative potential. In the face of citizen apathy and exhaustion from fruitless municipal consultations, we use playful and creative artistic practices to engage communities and produce the material necessary for design solutions.

To counter the top-down power of finance, the architect’s role requires repositioning, with new skills to mobilise communities as social power and involve them in systemic change. This mobilisation means designing structures as tools for engagement, creating artistic outputs that capture local knowledge and stories, reflective engagement maps and community programmes. The unit teaches a set of skills around how to inspire communities to cooperate with architects and each other as partners, strengthening our collective voice in order to effect change. Drawing from our established links to local communities, this year the unit will focus on three sites in London: Archway, Bow and Canada Water.

Our architectural propositions aim to give form to an architecture of relationships within the metaverse. This architecture visualises plural forms of expression and radically disrupts private wealth creation in order to produce tangible public goods. We will engage with communities as our clients with the aim of expanding beyond the micro-scale of a single neighbourhood. Here, architectural function goes beyond habitation, linked instead to systemic solutions and the production of common grounds. We frame this as ‘relational architecture’, responding to our current network society.