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The Traders’ Commune – A Market Garden Suburb

Part 1 Project 2011
Alex Cotterill
 University of Brighton | UK
The Traders’ Commune envisages a society of total self-sufficiency that aims to embrace and regenerate the surrounding area. In reaction to the current economic climate and deterioration of outer cities, the project acts as a critique of the development and decline of a failed planning model in Brighton’s suburbia.

The site (situated in Moulsecoomb, Brighton) has a history hindered by a 1920’s planning model, employing a ‘shared garden’ green space as a communal focal point to the seemingly idyllic surrounding suburb. It is the constant growth, increased traffic density, decline of the surrounding suburb and the failure to obtain economic support that has continued to aid the decline and ultimately, failure of the ‘Model Garden Suburb’.

In response to the site’s failings, the Traders’ Commune proposes to introduce complete urbanisation, mixing a series of corresponding programmes (growing, processing, trading and living) to adjust and enhance the urban fabric. Through these programmatic layers the project starts to evolve, each one responding to the site’s failures: communal usage, increased employment, economic growth and social vibrancy.

The project explores individual self-expression through architectural personalisation to break down the social boundaries created in a suburban housing environment. A continuous superstructure acts as a horizontal division between the private realm of the trader and the public forum of the street. Traders (the inhabitants) attach their own individually linked spaces in order to evolve their personal dwellings. Through constant reconfiguration, the idiosyncratic topology creates a community-oriented social fabric and challenges the immediate suburban social order.

A series of extensive streets become visual exhibitions of the inhabitants living either side. It is then within the subtle distinctive acts of personal desire and commodification, as well as the daily routine of a trader, grower and processor, that the shared street truly comes alive.

The Traders’ Commune aims to question how, through architectural personalisation, inhabitants can break down social barriers created in mass housing projects, ultimately helping to deliver a generic, self-made and fluctuating urban environment.

Alex Cotterill
Tutor(s)
Amin Taha
2011
The Traders' Commune - An urban interjection to corrupt the modern garden suburb
Exploring the history of the site and how it has developed to a failed garden suburb
Urban Proposal - Complete urbanisation of the site through frame personalisation and intergration
South Facing - The constant reconfiguration of the Trader's Commune creates a visual exhibition of the inhabitants
The masterplan shows an expansion into the surrounding urban fabric - Linking together the surounding suburbs with the new urban programme
The relationship of interior spaces to the street is explored in plan
As the site develops, the process of trading is expressed in the architecture - Trading - Storage - Production - Growing - Manufacturing
Through exploring a series of sections the design starts to highlight the relationship between the existing street the interior spaces and the new street
Technical Resolution of a chicken farmer living opposite his stock - Each component is clipped and plugged into the constant frame giving structural coherency
Exploded units show the relationships between living and producing areas each forming part of the Traders Commune
The street becomes an expression of each traders individuality helping to create a vibrant and fluctuation condition of streetlife
The production streets become galleries of constant activity and life - Even the public realm is used for production as each inhabitant spills out onto the street
Trading spaces become developed around particular factors - Sunlight - Position - Privacy - Program
As the site develops growing areas evolve to respond to the public need - Green spaces are evolved creating a gentle transition between old and new
• Page Hits: 10906         • Entry Date: 14 September 2011         • Last Update: 14 September 2011