A Comfortable Home – inspiring work is revealed from our students at The London School of Architecture.

11.04.2022

Our practice has sponsored a ‘Design Think Tank’ as part of the Masters programme at The London School of Architecture. Together with a group of students, we explored the meaning of home and comfort in housing, particularly so in light of the challenges faced by the climate emergency, the changing living patterns in the pandemic and the ever-increased diversity of London’s population.

To turn the design process around, we tasked our students to design from the inside out, with a thorough analysis and design of dwelling units preceding that of common spaces and eventually the building. This highlighted the importance ‘unit planning’, a task that is too often on the margins of housing design and too often dictated by the previously agreed massing and core layouts.

Under the umbrella of ‘A Comfortable Home’, the students collectively devised an adaptable housing typology that moved away from prescribed functions for each room and space, instead offering flexibility for each inhabitant to arrange their home to their liking. With our brief requiring every dwelling to be dual-through aspect, the students radically changed the morphology of today’s housing, harking back to some of the finest post-war examples.

Blazej Czuba commented: ‘It’s all too easy for architects to design open-plan flats with full-height windows that would suit other architects very well. It is far harder to devise a typology that can fit a diversity of people with their own desires, lifestyle, culture, or taste. The project that Daniel, Elliott, Funmi, George, Imogen and James have devised shows that good design can embed the adaptability needed to accommodate the huge variety of Londoners that end up living in buildings designed by us”.

Tutors:

Błażej Czuba (ML)

Daniel Ovalle Costal (LSA)

Emma Rutherford (ML)

Richard Lavington (ML)

Students:

Daniel Njoku

Elliott Wang

Funmi Adebiyi

George Kelly

Imogen Phillips

James Mearns

For a video of the students’ collective work please click here