▣ TYPE: Undergraduate design studio
⧇ INSTITUTION: The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
▤ KEY MATERIALS: Timber / Hempcrete / Adobe
▦ METHODOLOGY: Model Making / 1:1 Testing / System Design / Drawing
⧆ COLLABORATORS: Structure Workshop / HereEast / HG Matthews

In order to halt the progress of ecological breakdown we need to radically rethink the logic of current construction methods, the materials we use, our understandings of value, and critically, as our population continues to grow exponentially, our approach to urban growth. Low Carbon City proposes dense urban typologies which are both low-embodied carbon and responsive to their immediate material context. A critique of the government's new Garden Village initiative, these proposals draw from the principles of Ebenezer Howard's original Garden City and its positive integration of both industry and landscape into towns and cities. Testing both the built offsite and the prefabricated onsite, the work explores forgotten technologies and new forms of architectural language for homes and factories which sit alongside one another.

These proposals are designed to be factory made, involving different forms of pre-fabrication and drawing on the material resources and infrastructure of the surrounding context. They combine both the efficiencies, improved labour conditions and precision of the factory with ancient building technologies and materials. Each building is a model, a design that can be reproduced and reconfigured many times and in many different contexts. Together the buildings form a broader urban proposition, a self-sufficient town with its own housing, community buildings and productive spaces: a radical yet viable alternative to the status quo.

TEAM: Bengisu Demir, Christina Economides, Evelyn Salt, Latisha Chan, Maria De Salvador, Marius Balan, Nasra Abdullahi, Sara Mahmud, Sophia Brummendorf Malsch, Thomas Keeling, William Zeng and Yerkin Wilbrandt