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Perpetual Mutability

Part 2 Project 2024
Oliver Hartley
London School of Architecture | UK
Current construction processes are untenable; our built environment is manufactured from
petrochemical based, extractive materials that are detrimental to planetary health. Warranties, proprietary systems and insurance requirements limit our ability to maintain and repair the city.

The thesis posits we must change how we value materials: newly extracted materials are unviable for construction; and reclaimed building materials must retain their value once used. Thus our built fabric becomes a transitory store for future building materials. This will require an ongoing remaking of the city, rejecting the notion of a finished building, celebrating architecture as incomplete and perpetually mutable.

A proposal for Bishopsgate Goodsyard restores the goodsyard typology for construction materials and waste exploring how a dry stacked tectonic may enable more ephemeral forms of construction..

The goodsyard will be iteratively remade through the storing and extraction of materials. Material stacks are constructed according to how they may be assembled together, their material properties defining the spatial conditions created. This relationship subverts the typical design process where materials are procured to realise a design. In the proposal, material availability becomes the primary design tool.
The thesis explores the processes of an increasingly transient city, asking what is the architecture of reuse?

Oliver Hartley

Tutor(s)


2024
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