Katy Hope (she/her)
Architecture has a voice for change in society. Within my practice, I aim to immerse myself in this while incorporating social and cultural topics of diversity, equality, and sustainability. I enjoy playful architecture that facilitates imagination and encourages exploration, consciously considering the user group and our current climate at the centre of the design process.
A Place for Making
Historically, the East End of Glasgow was home to the trades people of Glasgow in its industrial period. By incorporating the hertiage of Dennistoun, a space for making to occur seems only ideal. This idea of creating a space for trades of making, this being woodwork, to create new things, would bring an added depth to Dennistoun’s hearty neighbourhood.
This project is a workshop and hall space which collaborates together and encourages the world of making and creating within the East End of Dennistoun. It will aim to encourage trades to be taught and practised within a wider demographic – bringing people together. Dennistoun is filled with schools and can encourage the wider Glasgow population to visit through its city transport links. This space would encourage that.
The facilities aim to blur the lines of performance and making – facilitating an environment that connects the two spheres together without a hierarchy, of which theatre-like space could exude.
By reusing the existing car garage canopy on the site and opening the two facilities into the centre with doorways, a workers yard exterior is created, bringing a lust for making in the area of Alexandra Parade. The workshop and hall space are connected by open fronts that lead directly onto the makers’ yard space, that would fully flow the site on Alexandra Parade. The canopy being an expansion of the cafe space or used for large outdoor making for protection.
The project includes main spaces of a hall, workshop, smaller workshop spaces with kitchen, classrooms and residency workshops, and the hall building including a cafe and storage spaces.
Affordances in Dennistoun
“Affordances : refer to the possibilities for use, intervention, and action which the physical world offers and are determined by the fit between a body’s structure, skills, and capacities for movement and the action-related properties of the environment”.
These ideas can be added through design interventions. By encouraging a variety of opportunities of affordance with the possibility of use and conversations through housing and urban building, the whole demographic of Dennistoun can benefit. Affordances have the potential to occur at any moment, with the idea that people can experience individual encounters through interacting with different elements of design.
The social demographic of Dennistoun is varied and has a clear distrubution of deprivation and age. Taking this further, within urban housing and an urban building, the social need would be to make these both a place for anyone, rather than determining that for the people. A space could mean a different thing for a family or a young individual, but the encouragement of what could be is exciting.
How do different design elements mean and do various roles for people? The imagination of what moments could take place can be associated with how communities interact and live.