Hide & Seek Part 1 Project 2001 Hina FarooqiJason Haigh University of East London London | UK The orientation of the unit was around games, where it was used as a conceptual instrument, aiding in the development of a design proposal. My project was for an integrated house and bookshop, situated within an enveloped void on the junction between Brick Lane and Fournier Street. Hide & Seek is based on the fact that the site is enclosed; a void that is non-existent to the naked eye. I decided to use the site and the occupiers of the integrated house / book shop, to play this game. In order to achieve this I used the concept of Isovists to discover what can and cannot be seen when one walks further into the site, and later within the building. The house and shop though separate areas, are made up of integrated spaces between the two. For example spaces within spaces – home within shop, thus initiating a ‘search’ and beginning the game.To keep the play ‘alive’, I introduced a mouldable and expandable shell. This allows for the expansion and retraction of the internal configurations of my proposal, negotiating in response to the slow activity of the site. The change allows for diversity of conditions to be established as your ‘landmark’ directing you from one place to another is being updated. This creates a new board on which the game is played between the house and the site as changes in site conditions becomes the ‘dice’, manipulating the activity during the play of the game. Within the context of the Unit - a new addition to the degree program, this student has investigated game strategies in architectural design.In the first part of the year, the student explored the impact of rules and constraints on social behaviour and urban form in London as well as ingeniously analysing sequential form production using the example of origami.In the development of her final project - an integrated house and bookshop in East London, the student played out the game of 'Hide & Seek'. The student engineered the collision of the domestic environment of the house with the commercial context of the bookshop. The intricate shape of the building, the plan layout as well as the sectional arrangement constitues the emergent quality of the perception games played by the occupants and costumes.In this project, the student not only responded to the unit brief, but took her spatial investigations far beyond what we anticipated.The student was able to do this by exploring creatively a great variety of media, skillfully combining model making with computer drawings and animation.