Restoring Tradition Through Craft Within the Urban Culture of East London:

Traditional craft and manual labour skills are becoming extinct in the current, profit-oriented climate. With a lack of historic knowledge and primitive skills, society is cultivating a new generation of absent youths voided of significant life skills taught in the rigorous processes of a past life. Located in East London, the Bethnal Green Arts Centre offers a mix-use public building to the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The site sits on the periphery of urbanisation and indulges in the polarity between high-rise commercial architecture and traditional architecture.

Integrating arts and culture back into the city, a programme composing clay, plaster, wax and metal workshops hopes to bring a community of beginner and expert level artists together; collectively developing crafting, carving, and moulding skills. These traditional practices require only a few, simple machines and tools to aid the process of hand-crafted art. Striving to create a more interconnected society the proposal also invites partnership programmes with local schools and practices, offers working studio spaces to accommodate large groups and aims to encourage and motivate careers in art and design. The arts centre unifies local, social and cultural heritage with reformed design concepts to enable passing public, commuters and visitors to gain a sense of belonging within their community.

Primarily utilizing reclaimed stock brick, the load-bearing concrete system of columns and slabs within deep masonry walls brings about a theme of skin and bones and their dynamic qualities relative to one another. Drawings, renders and models glimpse into the proportions and depth of openings as well as the wonderful, creative atmosphere which emerges through the public activation and tangibility of such tectonically motivated architecture.