Our site is the Moss Side Millenium Powerhouse, a multi-service youth hub located in the heart of Moss Side.

Through their large variety of spaces, ranging from a recording studio, a youth zone and more, the mission of the Powerhouse is to empower young people to reach their full potential.

During this site visit, Lisa gave us a tour of the building, while also highlighting the key spaces of the building and where the interventions could be useful to improve either the thermal performance or internal layout of the building. This particular discussion and site visit helped form the foundation of our project!

Hello! I'm Hana.

I'm from Brunei, but I completed my Part 1 here at the Manchester School of Architecture. I took a little under 2 years out to work in practice before coming back to Manchester to start my Master's in the PRAXXIS atelier.

My interests in architecture revolve around creating meaningful community and user-centric architecture with a social agenda alongside participatory design. My architecture skills mainly lie in Revit, Adobe Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign) and AutoCAD though I have some experience with Lumion.

Outside of architecture, I also love to travel, eat, binge watch series and read.

I'm looking forward to being able to work with both the community and collaborators in order to come up with creative ways to improve the fabric performance and internal spaces of the Powerhouse. I'm excited to meet everyone and see what we come up with!

Here are some of the design and software skills you will develop and learn over the 2 action weeks!

Apart from teamwork and working collaboratively with each other and the clients, we will focus on SWOT analysis, design development, technical resolution and graphic presentation skills - all which are valuable in both architecture school and in a professional context. We will also be providing different workshops for different softwares in order to support you in creating the outputs that will be presented to the collaborators at the end of the project.

The Powerhouse provides arts, mental health, physical and educational services to hundreds of young people each year.

For this project, we will be enhancing the Powerhouse's performance and sustainability in order to promote its usage and help to keep its services running at the quality the community deserves and at a long-term cost they can manage. We will also be looking at how the internal spaces and layout of the Powerhouse can be improved in order to further improve community life, foster cohesion and empower the youth of Moss Side.