ADS3: Tribes

How do we decide how to build our world? Taking politics + materials + culture ahead of program + client + site as primary generators of architecture, I investigated the tribe as a demarcation of inside from outside. Investigating Hackney in these terms highlighted key relationships between public housing, gentrification, places of worship and immigrant communities. The project explores alternatives to the cultural displacement of gentrification. To a now predominantly privately owned social housing estate, a group of five chapels are added, organised around cultural and social systems of immigrant communities who use churches as the focus of networks that compensate for life outside social security systems.