Hester Buck

My thesis explores the relationship between two conditions within contemporary architecture: the ambition of global preservation to protect larger and larger areas of the world and the rejection of post-war housing as a social project. By exploring how social housing could become listed, I have produced an alternative form of preservation.

The pressure of development is changing our planet at an ever-increasing speed. However, what is going widely unnoticed is the rapidly increasing areas of the world 'off-limits', protected from this march of development, in a proposed stasis. The scale and importance of preservation increases each year; the lack of critique in this as an urban design force is leading to a dichotomy of radical change or radical stasis. 

I have proposed a new form of listing, which protects the original ambition of the project. This implies both protection and adaptation according to the lifespan of the elements of the building.Thus, in my project, listing is no longer a fixed description of a condition, but becomes a cyclical evaluation of a performance reviewed against the original ambition.

By re-framing our understanding of history to address the recent past, as an uncompleted project, still active, needing evolution and change, the listing allows a revision of the ambition of the project.This challenges the authorship of all architecture, presenting not as a completed idea, but as the start of a dialogue that will evolve and change through use: the past as an incomplete project.