Day 1
Welcome to Forgotten Citizens!

Today we have welcomed our BA1 and BA2 students to join our team. We have spent some fun time together with some ice breaking activities to get know each other. We also joined Dominic Sagar’s talk on WOAH Workhouse Project. The talk has enriched our team a lot by giving us many interesting ideas on creating social infrastructure to integrate homeless people back in the community. Thank you very much Dominic!

Our team has started to investigate the backgrounds of homeless people. From the reasons for being homeless, demographics backgrounds to existing policies, we have discussed our findings as a team. Further investigations will be continued tomorrow.

Day 2 Schedule:

10:30 - Background Investigation
11:30 - Ideas Presentation from Dominic Sagar
13:30 - Background of WOAH and Issues of Homlessness in Manchester
Presentation from Dominic Sagar
14:30 - Initiatives and Precedents Studies
16:30 - Debrief

Day 2
Research on the Background of Homelessness in Manchester

Our team has split into two groups and investigated four different topics regarding background of homelessness in Manchester. The topics are "Reasons for Homelessness", "Types of Homelessness", "Demographics & Policies" and "Support Networks". Each group has justified their findings and discussed the distribution and needs of homeless people in Manchester generally. We also explored how existing initiatives and regulations to see how the society tackles homelessness issues. The research will be taken into account in our design intervention.

Day 3
Site Analysis of Cornerstone Day Centre

It was great to visit Cornerstone Day Centre. Our team received Patrick's talk about the detail information of existing building. Patrick has explained how the day centre operates everyday and the potential opportunities for reusing some spaces.

Day 4
Site Analysis
Group - Environment

Alex, Jessica and Louis did some research about the environment of built environment. From circulation to climate analysis, they expressed their findings by mappings. The research gives us the idea of site opportunities and constraints for the further design.

Day 4
Site Analysis
Group - History

Abu and Irina have investigated about the history of the Cornerstone Day Centre. They collaborated together and did a timeline diagram to show the past of the building. It clearly showed that the building has been used for supporting disadvantaged groups since the 1940s.

Day 4
Site Analysis
Group - Typologies

Anca, Tak and Tom did some studies about the existing building in regards to the spatial layout, materiality and urban relationship. They also looked at how the staffs and residents occupy and encounter each other inside. By examining the current condition of the building and end-users, we will try to redesign and upgrade part of the building with a cost-effective way.

Day 5
Design Charette 1 - Initial Development
Masterplan

The masterplan group has begun to develop new programmes on the site and tested out different options of spatial layouts. Irina showed her ideas on how the new masterplan responds to the client's brief and site context with her sketches and bubbles diagram. Other BA students also started to look at some precedents and discussed the masterplan ideas as a team.

Day 8

Day Centre Designing!
Today some of our team have done collages to express the key spaces. Anca has tested out the layout on bedrooms in the day centre whereas Abu focused on the communal spaces.

Day 8

Day Centre Extension Designing!
Irina and Alex both experimented the extension of daycentre and how spaces could be used and expressed in different architectural languages.

Day 9

More Allotment Designs!
In creating looking at the idea of urban farming in more detail, Evie and Tak have created collages to see how the idea can be applied in our site with the self-build tents concept.

Day 9

Chapel Designs!
The chapel has been described as a sacred space in our masterplan and allows resident to join and engage together. It is somehow a destination place where people worship within the neighbourhood. Abu and Irina have looked at different designs of churches and focused on how light interacts with materiality to create a sense of peace and tranquillity.

Day 9

Final Push!
Our team has worked really hard to produce drawings and visualizations for our designs. We showed our idea to our collaborators and presented our two weeks developed masterplan and building layouts to them. Based on their feedbacks, we are now compiling our works to presentation format for publication tomorrow.

Day 10
Submission Day!

Today our team will be working on final presentations and put all our works together for submission. After that we will have short reflection and thoughts discussion. It has been busy in these two weeks and there are many great works. Well done and thank you so much to everyone working on the project.