The Global Architecture Graduate Awards seek to identify projects with a critical position that advances the role of architecture in an increasingly fractured yet globalised world. The winner Haiwei Xie proposes B.R.I.C. House, this title combines the traditional English picture of domesticity with the acronym for the emerging economic nations (Brazil, Russia, India and China).
The project focuses on the poshest neighborhood of London, Chelsea; specifically in the furore over the Chelsea Barracks project, a luxury apartments development on a completely different development grain to the surrounding London streets. For this area the debate over what sort of development would fit the site was typically polarised between the ‘Modernists’ and the ‘traditionalists’. Haiwei Xie proposes a new solution that could possibly satisfy both camps, with its progressive high-density combined with its traditional urban morphology; the only sticking point for the traditionalists might be that the urban forms are foreign imports.
"The intention is to create a high-quality but low-price, high-density but low-rise housing development aimed at a diverse and multi-cultural society"
The architecture is shaped for the emerging groups of single parents, single persons and immigrants, and accordingly prioritises public space over private provision. Everything but personal bedrooms is shared, and Xie develops what she calls ‘public living rooms’, using development patterns borrowed from the four B.R.I.C. nations.
The project convincingly positions itself, not only in the global political and economic landscape, but also, architecturally, as a proposal for one of the capital city’s most contested sites. The dexterity and bravura of the presentation’s sampling of recognisable elements from many different places in order to make something new and distinctive neatly marries Xie’s visual rhetoric with her intellectual intent. It is also, in its more-or-less happy collision of cultures, a perfect metaphor for how the story of London is evolving; and a small parable of that larger 21st-century story: East meets West.
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