CDE Studio 42

RE:IMAGINE

Studio leader: Matthieu Bégoghina

As cities continue to urbanise and expand relentlessly, what were former fertile farming land became new towns, residential subdivisions, or industrial complexes as such. Former industrial stocks are now left vacant and underdeveloped; supermarket chains have also stopped renting big boxes and decided to build their own instead, leaving big vacant buildings in the middle of our cities that are now hardly rentable. Buildings are often designed to fit a specific set of uses and programs but most of the time, they tend to outlive these initial uses. Instead of demolishing and rebuilding new ones, this studio looks through the lens of adaptive reuse to propose a wide range of solutions for these existing spaces in our cities and fit them with new purposes and life.

In the studio, students will have to question their architecture principles, develop, and think about the idea of space, its capacity both in spatial and temporal aspects, and develop a response that would not only propose a more relevant use for the site, but also re:imagine a space more integrated with its local context.

RE:IMAGINE will be an open brief studio where students will be encouraged to develop their own spatial requirements, uses and projects, which could touch upon the principles of urban design, heritage, sustainability as well as relate to the current COVID-19 situation that largely impacted our normal use of space and a timeline of actions to ensure proposals remain flexible and relevant to the city over time.

View student projects on Miro

Architecture 2021_winter