Design Studio (Two) Six ARCHIVE

YEAR 2 – DS2.6

Tutors: Victoria Watson and Kirti Durelle

Victoria Watson is Senior Lecturer. She is the director of Doctor Watson Architects who design and publish work about architecture.

Kirti Durelle is an architect and a PhD student in architectural history at The Bartlett, UCL, where he also teaches.

Build Back Better: The Night Club

Studio 2.6 believes in the architectural project as a means of exploring and making statements about the world in which we live. In the context of the architecture school, the project also doubles-up as a unique, engaging and effective means for teaching and learning how to ‘do’ architecture. At second year level, this means building on skills that have already been introduced in first year. It is a place where ambitious students can equip themselves with a range of tools that will serve as useful and reliable means for imagining, exploring, modelling and drawing their design ideas, now and into the future.

This year, the studio looked at an institution that existed prior to the pandemic, but was not of much interest to mainstream architecture, namely the Night Club. We set out to re-imagine the Night Club for a post-pandemic world. We worked on a vacant site on Holborn Viaduct. The site is well-connected to both metropolitan and national rail networks and is easily accessible to a tremendous diversity of individuals and communities, right across the country, but especially in London and the South-East.

In semester one, we designed a Media Tower to serve as a publicity and communication facility for the new institution. In semester two we focused on the design of an Event Structure. Taken together, Media Tower, Event Structure and site context constitute the Night Club.