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The Assembly Rooms

Part 2 Project 2019
Annecy Atlee
London School of Architecture | UK
Throughout London, churches lacking adequate worship space - particularly those with largely immigrant congregations - have gathered in industrial buildings. By binding these at-risk communities alongside manufacturers also under threat, The Assembly Rooms aims to give both greater staying power.

Drawing architecturally from Gothic Cathedrals, foundries, factories, and civic infrastructure, this project celebrates the collision of typologies by accommodating worship space alongside industrial and maker spaces within the arches of existing railway viaducts in Bermondsey. Different users are provided with spaces in refurbished railway arches, which also accommodate shared facilities, including storage and a shared canteen. Between these, the large Assembly Rooms may be negotiated for use by different organisations.

More and more we are recognising the value of diverse - ‘mixed-use’ - spaces, but those most joyous collisions of function and typology are not the polite and clean and more often than not capitalistically driven typology mixes which grace the visuals of the developer’s brochure or in the masterplan visual. They do and must include the messy: the not-planned and planned-out.

The challenge is in how design might facilitate meaningful collision, and celebrate those territorial slippages...


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2019
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