Shadrach Meshack Abednego (making a part of the city) Part 2 Project 2002 James PayneRobert LisleRobert SquibbEsteban Jordan University of Bath | UK Our project was an affirmation of the city, and more specifically London. The contingent and unconscious development of the city and the feeling of being in a city informed our search for an appropriate architecture for making a part of the city. Initial research projects focussed on agglomerations of buildings and their materiality. The presence and continuity of these examples led us to devise a set of rules for our own project. A relaxed but coherent arrangement enabled us to act as different architects without the need for a masterplan, allowing the project to materialise in many different and sometimes unforeseen ways. We were interested in how a simple architecture could do complex things at many different levels. An intense mixture of many different spaces and experiences, generic and specific, was the result. Our project this year was to try to understand the condition of urbanity. Our students visited several agglomerative urban structures around Europe, places like Dean Clough in Halifax and the Sergels Torg in Stockholm. The students then started to apply their experiences and sensitivities to a large site in Southwark, just south of Tate Modern.James, Rob and Rob were key figures in the studio by bringing a wide range of issues about the city and modernism into the discourse of the year. By the end of the year, their space held an impressive library of books on the marginal and most unfashionable architects of the 20th century. Early on, they became interested in Team X's attempts to combine monuments and history with modern urbanism. Their project started as a hermetic and quite uptight mat project, but eventually it turned into something entirely different. Although the idea of monuments or fragments caught within a generic field is still there, more than anything their project is a celebration of the metropolitan city. It is about the unlikely adjacencies that come out of a great density and the generosity and openness that can emerge from a less precious idea of the city.