RCA Architecture Graduates The Focus Of New London Architecture Show

Futures Bright features work from architecture graduates Emma Emerson, Simon Moxey and Chris Green – the winners of this year’s New London Architecture (NLA) RCA Student Award.

According to Peter Murray, chairman of NLA, the three chosen projects are optimistic in addressing pressing urban issues around food, energy and social divisions, and offer ideas that will help shape the future of the city.

He said: ‘Out of a range of interesting, albeit somewhat dystopian, projects in the this year's show, I have chosen three schemes that both resonated with ideas about shaping the city that I admire, but also contain a hint of optimism.’

Stemming from a school of thought around what role architecture can play in food production, Chris Green’s Data Harvest is a ‘dynamic architecture’ concept that offers a highly original take on urban agriculture, integrating ideas around technology in architecture.

Green envisions a steel structure, with double skin glazing that could house insect cultivation clusters – a viable and sustainable food source for a growing urban population.

Cultivated insects would have value, not just in being farmed and processed as a food source, but for being intrinsic to the building’s energy provisions. Insect behavior – crickets’ draw to sunlight, for example – would be harnessed and incorporated into the building's systems. Furthermore, equipped with micro sensors and memory tags, insects could be digitally-activated to collect data and offer new insights into spatial, locational and therma-patterns.

In Zero Conflict Urbanism Community Boundary Trust (Olympic Legacy Fence), Emma Emerson addresses the displacement of unauthorised communities from development sites and suggests how, rather than their ejection, incorporating them into the development scheme could provide authorities with site management and security.

She envisions their ‘street activity’, be it guerilla gardening or local artistry, as imbuing areas with an egalitarian energy that might otherwise be lost in private development.

Taking the Olympic Park in Stratford as the basis for her theory, Emerson conceives modularised liminal habitations that can grow and adapt over time, responding as part of an eco-system, to their changing surrounding environment.

Such ‘top-down management with a bottom-up feel’ helps address concerns stemming from policies stimulating an increasing privatisation of the city and suggest how to bring ‘soul’ into corporate development.

Simon Moxey’s Come Friendly Bombs Banks explores the covert dominance of financial systems and trading over our lives, and how a centre based on financial data might manifest.

Just 2 per cent of financial trading firms control 70 per cent of the market volume – ‘faceless’ firms that employ algorithms to buy and sell shares ten times faster than the blink of an eye.

Moxey picks Slough as the starting point for his thinking. The suburban town is home to Europe's fastest growing global internet exchange, set to overtake the London Stock Exchange this year. It is also set to become the fastest connected point between Europe and the US.

Moxey has developed a grid system into which digital financial trading is inserted, visualising the growing importance of the 'data centre' as informing a new type of civic architecture.