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polis

Part 1 Project 2005
Paul Hunt
 London Metropolitan University | UK
The project is for a Town Hall for Tower Hamlets. It developed through a series of investigations, working mainly with models and large scale drawings, which examined relationships between street and interior, old and new pieces of city. It investigated how thresholds change over time, in pragmatic ways, using simple means. A 1:1 piece on the edge of the City made me interested in giving value to overlooked, everyday conditions. The building transforms found spaces of portal frame sheds into an open public facility, capable of adaption over time and through use - unintimidatingly engaging a diverse community.
Paul Hunt

Our theme this year was polis, root of politic and ancient embodiment of city.

Through consistent and careful use of large scale drawings and models, Pauls project moves from an examination of public and private thresholds at the scale of individual encounter, towards direct intervention at a critical moment of urban transformation.

His design for a town hall recognises potential within what are marginal and contingent spaces and exemplifies his critical observation of the apparently mundane. It is exemplary in its continuity of thought process and its critique of the nature of public ground and the institution, at many scales.
2005
Project in the context of East London. 1:500
A 1:1 drawing cuts through the façade of the terrace, examining the thinness of the boundary between public and private.A 1:5 investigates the nature and affect, of a street garden, between public and private.
(Spital Yard) an intervention measures the resultant, interstitial space between new and old. The found elements and the intervention support each other, working together to re-establish a threshold which recognises the buildings ‘between state’
It was interesting to compare a 1:50 structural model with the model of the Spital Yard urban block at the same scale. The huge floor plate of the shed complex offered the possibility that building and city might become intertwined
The scale of the building suggested that the interior might be defined as a landscape rather than a sequence of cellular spaces.
The existing shed is understood within the project as an envelope, containing a fragment of the larger city. The floorscape, which defines delimits the public spaces of the building, extends the language of the pavement into the interior
The existing skin of the building was to be removed, in order to offer improved environmental performance, natural light and views and a transformed relationship with the surroundings.
A series of notional, enclosed volumes, connected by a new ground were allowed to slip within the grid, potentially stretching or breaking through the enclosing skin.
New interior buildings, float within the larger space.
The council chamber is traditionally the formal focus of the Town Hall and is generally understood in an objectified way, as a figure. Recent buildings, such as the GLA’s recent City Hall, continue to understand the notion of a chamber in this way.
Here it is intended that the space is open and temporal. Bleacher seating can allow the space to transform as a space of assembly for many different activities.
The Public Spaces.A place of work and discussion, beyond the private offices. The lower spaces provide the front end interface, a first point of contact, for the six Departments housed in the floating rooms above.
Cutaway axonometric of proposal
Tower Hamlets Council currently holds 33,000 boxes of files, scattered in storage warehouses in Kent and across the Borough. The new tower brings them to a single location, a dense mass of information in relation to the loose spaces of the interior.
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